I am not a fan of the Fenland countryside so it came as a surprise to discover that it can be ruined. The instruments of destruction of our long green silence of countryside are, of course, Wind Turbines, the Triffid de nos jours. According to Stephen Mitten in his book on cognitive archeology “Prehistory of the Mind”, our world is a play that has gone on for six million years but all the action is confined to a hundred thousand years. Human life has appeared in 25,000 of them. If this, as he claims, is the last act it has been a tragedy in which the human race has played Feste, the clown.In Afghanistan a drug is freely grown which is responsible for most of the crime in the so called civilised world. We ignore it and fight a mock enemy, which we wrongly called Islam. Islam is not the enemy. The enemy is the Wahabi, a fanatical religious sect which we allowed to flourish when its embers were first blown into flame by Ibn Saud to create Saudi Arabia, the kingdom which now holds the world to ransom. Our rescue services are denuded; our workers are taken from useful civilian life to fight a tribal uprising in a country where the terrain dictates tribesman must always win. At the same time the coasts of Mexico are open to the Columbian drug cartels because the country is too poor to police them. That is where the armies of the West ought to be. Fighting the drugs war which is the greatest threat to our own civilisation. It is a war we could win. The climate has been changing at intervals for six million years. We cannot beat it, so we invent a strategy. The EU imposes laws governing the use of natural resources. We respond by offering energy providers huge sums to create wind farms on land which the farmers are glad to rent to them to ease their own financial difficulties. I was interested in Christopher Booker’s claim in the Sunday Times that the combined electricity output of all the 2,000 wind turbines so far built in Britain is less than that of a single, medium-sized conventional power station. According to Booker, Table 7.5 of the energy statistics on the Department for Business website, which quotes the latest annual figure for wind energy, shows that it contributed 4,225 gigawatt hours. Dividing that by the 8,760 hours in a year gives a total average output of 482 megawatts.Table 5.11, listing every UK power plant, shows that nearly 50 conventional power stations were each capable of contributing more than that. Even if we could build the 7,000 additional wind turbines Gordon Brown dreams of, their combined output would not be much more than that of the single coal-fired power station at Drax, he claims.
One of his readers suggested that http://www.theglobalwarmingdebate.net/ink makes interesting reading. And it does.
*****************************
What would we do if France invaded the Channel Isles? When Egypt took back the Suez Canal we went to war.
Our ownership of the Falklands Islands rests on a dubious claim in the 18th century, mocked at by Sam Johnson. China's announcement that Tibet was part of China was also made in the 18th century. When Argentina claimed the Falkland Islands we went to war, to defend a population whose British passports we had taken away and was, anyway, leased to British Coalite. Should we counter invade Tibet? We made a cock up of the Younghusband invasion of that country and we were the laughing stock of the world when we invaded Abyssinia (see the Barefoot Emperor). What would we have done if the Tynwald had signed up the Isle of Man with the Warsaw Pact countries during the Cold War, as Georgia seeks to do with NATO?
For 300 years it was the central plank of British Foreign policy that BRITAIN DID NOT INTERFERE WITH THE INTERNAL AFFAIRS OF OTHER COUNTRIES.
It is one plank we should continue to walk.
PS a pretty girl mimed a song at the opening of the Olympics and China earned the contempt of commentators who also pointed out, with great glee, that the fireworks display was digitally enhanced.Do they think that the actors actually sang the songs in Hollywood musicals or that the countless hordes of soldiers in films like the Lord of the Rings are real people?. It is called show business.
***********
I am so glad that in lovely Cool Britannia we can all abandon the stiff upper lip and explore cowardice as an art form. I have taken to it like a duck to water. I practise it all the time. Although I do say it myself, I am getting quite good at it. The next time I get a headache I am going straight into counselling.
When I think of all those years I wasted pretending to be brave, discovering cowardice is a joy akin to removing tight corsets or changing from shoes that pinch into slippers. The trick is to admit, in a manly way: “I would like to but, frankly, I would be scared stiff.”
None of my contemporaries believes me, of course. They are so used to that dreadful old British thing about putting a brave face on things they do not realise that in this grave new world cowardice is cool. Asteroids miss us by a million miles and humanity quakes; the prospect of duty free anthrax had the headlines shivering (I believe that scare story was a spin doctor’s ploy in support of the EU proposals for a duty free ban). A flu Pandemic and A World of Water wait in the wings with The End of the World. A medical magazine published a report of tentative research to suggest danger in triple injections and British mothers united to ululate on the six o’clock news. Now the prospect of measles injections terrify.
Those silly friends who fought in several wars and a number of marriages think I really have another secret reason for not wanting to climb Snowdon, even in a train. They cannot accept I am so frightened of heights that if I had been born a woman I would not have been able to wear high heels.
When my son suggested I might like to sail with him in a small boat from Anglesey to the Isle of Man, I declined with regret. I pointed out that I am the only father he has got and, since the edition is so limited, I must do everything in my power to ensure it does not go out of print. I got all the seafaring experience I want I told him, pacing the decks of piers.
Alas, constructive cowardice does limit opportunity. I am forced to say a regretful ‘no’ to tempting offers of hang-gliding, water skiing and wind-surfing. Even arm-wrestling can give you a nasty bruise and, despite a long career in the mouth-boxing booths of the BBC, competitive name calling is out of the question.
I claim my B.Sc. (Bachelor of Supreme Cowardice).
ends
Sunday, 17 August 2008
Saturday, 9 August 2008
TRAVEL BROADENS THE WAISTLINE
I sat down on what may well be the last milestone on the long, dusty and frequently high road that has been my life and considered the journey.
Although I own neither house, nor car; can boast no gainful employment; no hobbies or, alas, no longer any vices , I seem to have gathered a great pile of luggage.
I have read all the books, heard all the music and seen all the pictures I need. I have visited most of the major cities in Europe and, more important, eaten in them.
Paris? Hostile. Rome, Florence and Verona? Overcrowded. Brussels? Boring and untidy. Amsterdam? Diffuse, unable to make its mind up what it is. Venice? A raddled old Queen of the Adriatic, throbbing with catarrh.
Some good things about them, forbye. All have superb art galleries and fine restaurants. Allards in Paris on the Rue des Beaux Arts for the duck smothered in olives; Ranieri’s at the foot of the Spanish Steps in Rome for strawberries marinated in good red wine; Sasso di Dante by the Giotto bell tower in Florence, the home of good cooking; Five Flies in Amsterdam for good, no nonsense food in giant portions Red Rum couldn’t jump over and dozens of Indonesian bistros serving exotic delicacies in a bewildering array of dishes. Brussels? Any stall that sells chips, though hold the mayo.
For many years my favourite cities, I thought, were Bruges and Vienna, which both have superb Christmas markets and excellent restaurants. Sacher in Vienna of course for Weiner schnitzel and lovely young green wine, where Franz Josef wisely said: “I am Emperor and will have dumplings.”. The Palace of Schonbrun where my .Hapsburg moustaches were venerated and where in search of the marionette theatre we found ourselves in a conference of Japanese businessmen and were sent on our way with a gift of costly perfume to the Orangerie, where the marionettes were cancelled but we were consoled with another gift - champagne and a video of a puppet Magic Flute. The Rathaus where the stained glass windows become an advent card
The Austrians, of course, are an unsuccessful attempt to make a German out of an Italian. Apart from the Koreans, they are the cruellest race on Earth. In the romantic Vienna woods there is an underground lake which is boosted as a delightful tourist attraction. They show no shame in selling postcards of it from photographs taken during the war when it was used as an aircraft factory where hundreds of slave workers died.
Bruges old town has a happier history. Ice skating on a rink that is set up in front of the Town Hall, my two favourite art galleries, and a bar with a hundred beers on tap. The Golden Basket restaurant, which when we visited was owned by a devastating beauty, serves symphonic variations of mussels
So it came as a surprise to discover that of all the cities I have visited my total and absolute favourite is - Peterborough.
It has a delightful Italian restaurant, a medieval cathedral, in which two queens were buried, with the finest façade in Europe. A wide boulevard runs through the centre of the city, quite the equal of the Ramblas in Barcelona, more parks than London, four theatres, a lovely pastoral riverside and shopping malls of considerable elegance.
Clearly, whatever it does to the waistline, travel narrows the mind
*******************************************************
I do regret not visiting China. The country has fascinated me since, as a young soldier, I read Lin Yutang’s delightful book “The Importance of Living”. That led me to its poets and painters and scholars, to marvellous novels like the Monkey Epic., Six Chapters in a Floating Life, Before Midnight Scholar
It was an obsession shared with my much loved father-in-law Dr Joe, who in his sixties learned Cantonese so that he could deal with his patients in Chinatown.
Through him, I made many Chinese friends. One couldn’t speak English when he arrived in this country, aged 14. By the time he was sixteen he had gathered a harvest of “A’s” in his “A” Levels and at 23 he had a mathematical theorem named after him.
His great grandfather had been a bureaucrat in the court of the Manchus but had fallen under the spell of the opium which the British introduced. As a result, he became so poor that he could not afford to buy the classics which his son needed for school. His solution was to come out of his opium induced semi-coma to write out the entire canon of Chinese classics from memory.
I had another friend who served on the China squadron in the Thirties when public beheadings were a daily occurrence and the peasants were treated like animals.
The Tiger of Chi’n who unified China decreed that the world started with his reign and ordered that every manuscript and painting be destroyed. Nothing changes. Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution had similar aims,
There are four Chinese languages: the ancient style in which the classics are written, the literary style, the business style and the colloquial.
China’s system of law was formulated in the time of Yao (2357 to 2255 B,C.). It has been described as “if not the most just and equitable, at least the most comprehensive, uniform and suited to the genius of the people for whom it is designed, perhaps of any that ever existed.”
To a Chinaman, the civilised world is China. Anything or anyone beyond its frontiers is barbarian. Perversely, they also have a sense that the West wishes to humiliate them.
In 1924, Sun Yat-sen wrote that China had suffered decades of economic oppression by the foreign powers and was being transformed into a colony,
In his 1947 book, China's Destiny, Chiang Kai-shek wrote:
“During the past hundred years, the citizens of the entire country, suffering under the yoke of the unequal treaties which gave foreigners special ‘concessions’ and extra-territorial status in China, were unanimous in their demand that the national humiliation be avenged, and the state be made strong.”
And when the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949, Mao Ze Dong declared, "Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation. We...have stood up."
The Chinese are different.
The Chinese see nothing wrong with slave labour; they believe Tibet is part of China. They are suspicious of the West with good reason. We did our best to wreck the country by flooding it with opium; we invaded Tibet, a country that has suffered under a dictatorship of monks and aristocratic families throughout its history.
Whatever our views, by agreeing to hold the Olympics in China we have become complicit in their system of government.
I am not a friend of exertion. I think the desire to run faster than the next person or to pummel a complete stranger is the harvest of a limited intelligence and the art of spear throwing became redundant at Rorke’s Drift. Certainly I do not wish my world view to be influenced by practitioners in these curious activities. But it does seem to me that if those 40 athletes disagreed so passionately with the Chinese way of life they should have stayed away from Beijing.
Nor do I see why two supposedly intelligent undergraduates should think that by dangling a banner they would change the purpose of the Chinese leaders. That their exploits, which they did not undertake without first discovering they would not be harshly treated by the authorities, should attract such a storm of fawning publicity is beyond me.
It is a pity that equal publicity was not given to the announcement that the Dalai Lama has been invited to Beijing to take part in an important ceremony.
It has taken China twenty years to move from the Middle Ages to leading the 21st century world. Perhaps smog does hang over their capital. Very much like the Potteries in the Sixties, in fact.
Off hand, I cannot remember the Potteries producing a spectacle anything like the Opening Ceremony of the Games.
= **************************************************
One of the few R4 “Flagship” programmes worth listening to is “You and Yours”. Last week it carried an interesting item on the way Llandudno is allowing its links with Alice in Wonderland to decay.
Alice was the daughter of the Dean of Christchurch, Oxford, who had a holiday home on the foreshore. Once a hotel, it is about to be demolished to make way for a block of flats. The statue of the White Rabbit nearby has been vandalised and the Rabbit Hole, a wonderful “museum” of Aliceobilia, is to close.
Predictably, a “save our links with Alice“ movement has been launched which endearingly dismisses the sad truth that Charles Dodgson is unlikely to have visited Llandudno, and certainly the book was neither written nor inspired there
One might just as well celebrate Arnold Bennett who set in Llandudno an exciting part of “The Card” where Denry is launched as an entrepreneur.
The truth is that the Alice link has long been an embarrassment to the nationalists who now run the country.
Quite out of the question for a country where holidaymakers are handed leaflets saying “Enjoy your holiday but don’t buy a house here.”
Without its tourist industry North Wales would collapse. But nationalists are still uneasy that their homeland’s fame rests on an English Second Home as does the greater part of its economy.
Although I own neither house, nor car; can boast no gainful employment; no hobbies or, alas, no longer any vices , I seem to have gathered a great pile of luggage.
I have read all the books, heard all the music and seen all the pictures I need. I have visited most of the major cities in Europe and, more important, eaten in them.
Paris? Hostile. Rome, Florence and Verona? Overcrowded. Brussels? Boring and untidy. Amsterdam? Diffuse, unable to make its mind up what it is. Venice? A raddled old Queen of the Adriatic, throbbing with catarrh.
Some good things about them, forbye. All have superb art galleries and fine restaurants. Allards in Paris on the Rue des Beaux Arts for the duck smothered in olives; Ranieri’s at the foot of the Spanish Steps in Rome for strawberries marinated in good red wine; Sasso di Dante by the Giotto bell tower in Florence, the home of good cooking; Five Flies in Amsterdam for good, no nonsense food in giant portions Red Rum couldn’t jump over and dozens of Indonesian bistros serving exotic delicacies in a bewildering array of dishes. Brussels? Any stall that sells chips, though hold the mayo.
For many years my favourite cities, I thought, were Bruges and Vienna, which both have superb Christmas markets and excellent restaurants. Sacher in Vienna of course for Weiner schnitzel and lovely young green wine, where Franz Josef wisely said: “I am Emperor and will have dumplings.”. The Palace of Schonbrun where my .Hapsburg moustaches were venerated and where in search of the marionette theatre we found ourselves in a conference of Japanese businessmen and were sent on our way with a gift of costly perfume to the Orangerie, where the marionettes were cancelled but we were consoled with another gift - champagne and a video of a puppet Magic Flute. The Rathaus where the stained glass windows become an advent card
The Austrians, of course, are an unsuccessful attempt to make a German out of an Italian. Apart from the Koreans, they are the cruellest race on Earth. In the romantic Vienna woods there is an underground lake which is boosted as a delightful tourist attraction. They show no shame in selling postcards of it from photographs taken during the war when it was used as an aircraft factory where hundreds of slave workers died.
Bruges old town has a happier history. Ice skating on a rink that is set up in front of the Town Hall, my two favourite art galleries, and a bar with a hundred beers on tap. The Golden Basket restaurant, which when we visited was owned by a devastating beauty, serves symphonic variations of mussels
So it came as a surprise to discover that of all the cities I have visited my total and absolute favourite is - Peterborough.
It has a delightful Italian restaurant, a medieval cathedral, in which two queens were buried, with the finest façade in Europe. A wide boulevard runs through the centre of the city, quite the equal of the Ramblas in Barcelona, more parks than London, four theatres, a lovely pastoral riverside and shopping malls of considerable elegance.
Clearly, whatever it does to the waistline, travel narrows the mind
*******************************************************
I do regret not visiting China. The country has fascinated me since, as a young soldier, I read Lin Yutang’s delightful book “The Importance of Living”. That led me to its poets and painters and scholars, to marvellous novels like the Monkey Epic., Six Chapters in a Floating Life, Before Midnight Scholar
It was an obsession shared with my much loved father-in-law Dr Joe, who in his sixties learned Cantonese so that he could deal with his patients in Chinatown.
Through him, I made many Chinese friends. One couldn’t speak English when he arrived in this country, aged 14. By the time he was sixteen he had gathered a harvest of “A’s” in his “A” Levels and at 23 he had a mathematical theorem named after him.
His great grandfather had been a bureaucrat in the court of the Manchus but had fallen under the spell of the opium which the British introduced. As a result, he became so poor that he could not afford to buy the classics which his son needed for school. His solution was to come out of his opium induced semi-coma to write out the entire canon of Chinese classics from memory.
I had another friend who served on the China squadron in the Thirties when public beheadings were a daily occurrence and the peasants were treated like animals.
The Tiger of Chi’n who unified China decreed that the world started with his reign and ordered that every manuscript and painting be destroyed. Nothing changes. Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution had similar aims,
There are four Chinese languages: the ancient style in which the classics are written, the literary style, the business style and the colloquial.
China’s system of law was formulated in the time of Yao (2357 to 2255 B,C.). It has been described as “if not the most just and equitable, at least the most comprehensive, uniform and suited to the genius of the people for whom it is designed, perhaps of any that ever existed.”
To a Chinaman, the civilised world is China. Anything or anyone beyond its frontiers is barbarian. Perversely, they also have a sense that the West wishes to humiliate them.
In 1924, Sun Yat-sen wrote that China had suffered decades of economic oppression by the foreign powers and was being transformed into a colony,
In his 1947 book, China's Destiny, Chiang Kai-shek wrote:
“During the past hundred years, the citizens of the entire country, suffering under the yoke of the unequal treaties which gave foreigners special ‘concessions’ and extra-territorial status in China, were unanimous in their demand that the national humiliation be avenged, and the state be made strong.”
And when the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949, Mao Ze Dong declared, "Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation. We...have stood up."
The Chinese are different.
The Chinese see nothing wrong with slave labour; they believe Tibet is part of China. They are suspicious of the West with good reason. We did our best to wreck the country by flooding it with opium; we invaded Tibet, a country that has suffered under a dictatorship of monks and aristocratic families throughout its history.
Whatever our views, by agreeing to hold the Olympics in China we have become complicit in their system of government.
I am not a friend of exertion. I think the desire to run faster than the next person or to pummel a complete stranger is the harvest of a limited intelligence and the art of spear throwing became redundant at Rorke’s Drift. Certainly I do not wish my world view to be influenced by practitioners in these curious activities. But it does seem to me that if those 40 athletes disagreed so passionately with the Chinese way of life they should have stayed away from Beijing.
Nor do I see why two supposedly intelligent undergraduates should think that by dangling a banner they would change the purpose of the Chinese leaders. That their exploits, which they did not undertake without first discovering they would not be harshly treated by the authorities, should attract such a storm of fawning publicity is beyond me.
It is a pity that equal publicity was not given to the announcement that the Dalai Lama has been invited to Beijing to take part in an important ceremony.
It has taken China twenty years to move from the Middle Ages to leading the 21st century world. Perhaps smog does hang over their capital. Very much like the Potteries in the Sixties, in fact.
Off hand, I cannot remember the Potteries producing a spectacle anything like the Opening Ceremony of the Games.
= **************************************************
One of the few R4 “Flagship” programmes worth listening to is “You and Yours”. Last week it carried an interesting item on the way Llandudno is allowing its links with Alice in Wonderland to decay.
Alice was the daughter of the Dean of Christchurch, Oxford, who had a holiday home on the foreshore. Once a hotel, it is about to be demolished to make way for a block of flats. The statue of the White Rabbit nearby has been vandalised and the Rabbit Hole, a wonderful “museum” of Aliceobilia, is to close.
Predictably, a “save our links with Alice“ movement has been launched which endearingly dismisses the sad truth that Charles Dodgson is unlikely to have visited Llandudno, and certainly the book was neither written nor inspired there
One might just as well celebrate Arnold Bennett who set in Llandudno an exciting part of “The Card” where Denry is launched as an entrepreneur.
The truth is that the Alice link has long been an embarrassment to the nationalists who now run the country.
Quite out of the question for a country where holidaymakers are handed leaflets saying “Enjoy your holiday but don’t buy a house here.”
Without its tourist industry North Wales would collapse. But nationalists are still uneasy that their homeland’s fame rests on an English Second Home as does the greater part of its economy.
Saturday, 2 August 2008
I SWEAR BY ALMIGHTY WATERSHED.....................
I was the first broadcaster in Britain to indecently expose myself on television. My first TV appearance, which only makes it worse.
It is no excuse to say I did so in the company of a distinguished homeopathic doctor and a rather prim friend, a scholarly man of great dignity. What made things even worse is that the film went on to win awards all over the world.
It was unintentional and a sly ploy by the man who made the film, Ray Gosling, who is as near as I have come to working with a broadcasting genius. It was bad enough that in his commentary he compared us to Ratty, Mole and the Badger which almost caused a rift between the scholar and me over which one of us was Badger.
The subject of this odd little film was “Chester” and we had been hours on a canal barge chatting, telling stories and drinking oceans of beer. The moment filming was over, as we thought, we leapt from the barge to rid ourselves of the beer.
Not only did Gosling film us lined up against a convenient wall; he overlaid a soundtrack in which we appeared to be singing “Chest-er Song at Twilight”.
The resultant abuse not only filled two pages of the local paper; it was gleefully reported in the national press and the subject of a Private Eye sneer. Years later Gosling reported that our song was part of a tape which played on a loop in the gentleman’s lavatory of a pub near the new Manchester Crown Court
Goodness knows what our critics would have thought of the BBC mandarin who I heard aver on “Feedback” that swearing on air was acceptable at certain times from anyone and at any time by certain broadcasters.
It is an odd concept.
Long ago when the world was grown up, there were jocks and taffs, eyeties and micks, sambos and sheenies, krauts and Yorkshire Tykes. A Jew was a yid; I called my best friend, who was black, "Sambo" and he called me "Specky Four Eyes". The Chinese were Chinks; Tiddlywinks, even. But if you said “bloody” in front of a woman there was hell to play (which itself is a phrase I would not have dared use on radio when I started broadcasting forty years ago). Today I could get the sack for using such racial labels as the ones I listed. A brave broadcaster said recently that so many of the top jobs in broadcasting are held by homosexuals that an anti-gay joke would mean the end of a comic's broadcasting career. Another odd concept since it is still possible to make anti-heterosexual jests. Though I was delighted to see the gollywog is back in the shops. Indeed my wife bought me one which I treasure. Surprising in all the fuss that innocent and very lovable doll created that no one complained of the various unflattering white dolls of the time
"Yid" still shocks. Yet it is merely a contraction of the respectable "Yiddish". "Niger" is the Latin for black and strangely "nigger" is used widely by blacks themselves.
Alas, obscenities are the every day currency of radio and TV, and only old codgers like me get upset. Readers of my Daily Post column used to get very exercised at the use of “Welshing” as a verb. Today it is racial abuse. In the Middle Ages it was polite coinage. At that time English law was only enforceable in the castle towns in Wales where Englishmen traded. The countryside was governed by ancient Welsh law, a custom which survives in names like Welsh Frankton. An English debtor could evade his creditors by going to live outside the town. He was said to have “Welshed”.
“Welshing” insulted the English, not the Welsh.
Unacceptable language is a matter of fashion. The same BBC mandarin said that young people did not worry about swearing. My wife had to leave a ladies' football team because she could not take the obscene language the girls routinely used. Strangely when the BBC ran a poll the 897 people asked were more worried about the words “spastic” and “whore”than common swear words. The poll rated the “c” word as the most extreme expletive. The “f” word was in third place, after “ Motherf.....er”, an unhappy American import.
Surprisingly, it wasn't bad language that was unacceptable but the time of night it is used. To adapt Gertrude Stein, surely “An F is an F is an F”?
Nine out of ten adults in all age groups polled felt that bad language was unwelcome, when they were listening with children.
Presumably they have never travelled on a school bus. Nor it seems do they object to the mass slaughter, mindless violence and sexual innuendo which is basic television fare.
Young people worry less about this issue than older people. Why should that be? Is it because the use of coarse language is bad manners and young people dont have any manners at all?
Surprisingly, "wanker" and "bastard" came fourth and fifth in the severity poll. The first wasn't even considered swearing in my day and the state of bastardy is socially quite acceptable. Why should the nouns shock? Why should language be good or bad depending on the time of day it is used - and, more than that, the context? People accept it, we are told, in violent films, comedies and documentaries.
Surely if language is unacceptable the time it is spoken is irrelevant?
My father’s favourite swear words were “bloody black gaiters” and I too find it very satisfying as an expression of surprise. My own favourite is "frass", which, as I am sure you know, is the scientific name for the body waste of a butterfly. The nearest my wife gets to swearing is "Horrors". On one occasion when another reporter put a plastic spider on her desk "Horrors" was not sufficient to express her outrage.
She said "Multiple Horrors".
There are other assemblies of letters describing bodily functions which do relieve the tensions when used. but a lexicon of respectable swear words is needed. A list of new words which have no other purpose than relieving tensions. A form of psychologically satisfying scrabble is what I have in mind.
Most of the non-blasphemous swear words refer either to bodily parts or functions. It is quite surprising how many are corruptions of Saxon. The Normans considered Saxon a very inferior language and it was never used in polite society. Is our distaste for swear words merely vestigal political correctness and snobbery?
ends
DANGEROUS CUTTING(S)
(from reader Ken Ashton)
SUN – Police were called to a supermarket in West Sussex when two pensioners on mobility scooters had a row about money. They were
crashing into each other in the fruit and veg aisle. ‘They were ramming each other like dodgems,’ said a supervisor.
TIMES – A driver who witnessed a car crash in Belchamp Otten, Essex, let a young girl sit in his car while awaiting the ambulance. When
paramedics arrived, they considered the girl may have severe spinal injuries and the only safe way to rescue her was to cut off the roof
of the friendly motorist’s car. He was not amused.
PS: Much amused at the cries of horror which have gone up over China’s action in imprisoning agitators during the Olympic Games.
At least they will be spared watching them on TV.
When the investiture of the Prince of Wales was held in Caernarvon I was warned by the Special Branch who had got it into their heads I was a Welsh terrorist that I would be arrested if I was found within three miles of the city. Some genuine, if deeply comic, nationalists were actually put in prison for fear they would disturb the Princely Peace.
It is no excuse to say I did so in the company of a distinguished homeopathic doctor and a rather prim friend, a scholarly man of great dignity. What made things even worse is that the film went on to win awards all over the world.
It was unintentional and a sly ploy by the man who made the film, Ray Gosling, who is as near as I have come to working with a broadcasting genius. It was bad enough that in his commentary he compared us to Ratty, Mole and the Badger which almost caused a rift between the scholar and me over which one of us was Badger.
The subject of this odd little film was “Chester” and we had been hours on a canal barge chatting, telling stories and drinking oceans of beer. The moment filming was over, as we thought, we leapt from the barge to rid ourselves of the beer.
Not only did Gosling film us lined up against a convenient wall; he overlaid a soundtrack in which we appeared to be singing “Chest-er Song at Twilight”.
The resultant abuse not only filled two pages of the local paper; it was gleefully reported in the national press and the subject of a Private Eye sneer. Years later Gosling reported that our song was part of a tape which played on a loop in the gentleman’s lavatory of a pub near the new Manchester Crown Court
Goodness knows what our critics would have thought of the BBC mandarin who I heard aver on “Feedback” that swearing on air was acceptable at certain times from anyone and at any time by certain broadcasters.
It is an odd concept.
Long ago when the world was grown up, there were jocks and taffs, eyeties and micks, sambos and sheenies, krauts and Yorkshire Tykes. A Jew was a yid; I called my best friend, who was black, "Sambo" and he called me "Specky Four Eyes". The Chinese were Chinks; Tiddlywinks, even. But if you said “bloody” in front of a woman there was hell to play (which itself is a phrase I would not have dared use on radio when I started broadcasting forty years ago). Today I could get the sack for using such racial labels as the ones I listed. A brave broadcaster said recently that so many of the top jobs in broadcasting are held by homosexuals that an anti-gay joke would mean the end of a comic's broadcasting career. Another odd concept since it is still possible to make anti-heterosexual jests. Though I was delighted to see the gollywog is back in the shops. Indeed my wife bought me one which I treasure. Surprising in all the fuss that innocent and very lovable doll created that no one complained of the various unflattering white dolls of the time
"Yid" still shocks. Yet it is merely a contraction of the respectable "Yiddish". "Niger" is the Latin for black and strangely "nigger" is used widely by blacks themselves.
Alas, obscenities are the every day currency of radio and TV, and only old codgers like me get upset. Readers of my Daily Post column used to get very exercised at the use of “Welshing” as a verb. Today it is racial abuse. In the Middle Ages it was polite coinage. At that time English law was only enforceable in the castle towns in Wales where Englishmen traded. The countryside was governed by ancient Welsh law, a custom which survives in names like Welsh Frankton. An English debtor could evade his creditors by going to live outside the town. He was said to have “Welshed”.
“Welshing” insulted the English, not the Welsh.
Unacceptable language is a matter of fashion. The same BBC mandarin said that young people did not worry about swearing. My wife had to leave a ladies' football team because she could not take the obscene language the girls routinely used. Strangely when the BBC ran a poll the 897 people asked were more worried about the words “spastic” and “whore”than common swear words. The poll rated the “c” word as the most extreme expletive. The “f” word was in third place, after “ Motherf.....er”, an unhappy American import.
Surprisingly, it wasn't bad language that was unacceptable but the time of night it is used. To adapt Gertrude Stein, surely “An F is an F is an F”?
Nine out of ten adults in all age groups polled felt that bad language was unwelcome, when they were listening with children.
Presumably they have never travelled on a school bus. Nor it seems do they object to the mass slaughter, mindless violence and sexual innuendo which is basic television fare.
Young people worry less about this issue than older people. Why should that be? Is it because the use of coarse language is bad manners and young people dont have any manners at all?
Surprisingly, "wanker" and "bastard" came fourth and fifth in the severity poll. The first wasn't even considered swearing in my day and the state of bastardy is socially quite acceptable. Why should the nouns shock? Why should language be good or bad depending on the time of day it is used - and, more than that, the context? People accept it, we are told, in violent films, comedies and documentaries.
Surely if language is unacceptable the time it is spoken is irrelevant?
My father’s favourite swear words were “bloody black gaiters” and I too find it very satisfying as an expression of surprise. My own favourite is "frass", which, as I am sure you know, is the scientific name for the body waste of a butterfly. The nearest my wife gets to swearing is "Horrors". On one occasion when another reporter put a plastic spider on her desk "Horrors" was not sufficient to express her outrage.
She said "Multiple Horrors".
There are other assemblies of letters describing bodily functions which do relieve the tensions when used. but a lexicon of respectable swear words is needed. A list of new words which have no other purpose than relieving tensions. A form of psychologically satisfying scrabble is what I have in mind.
Most of the non-blasphemous swear words refer either to bodily parts or functions. It is quite surprising how many are corruptions of Saxon. The Normans considered Saxon a very inferior language and it was never used in polite society. Is our distaste for swear words merely vestigal political correctness and snobbery?
ends
DANGEROUS CUTTING(S)
(from reader Ken Ashton)
SUN – Police were called to a supermarket in West Sussex when two pensioners on mobility scooters had a row about money. They were
crashing into each other in the fruit and veg aisle. ‘They were ramming each other like dodgems,’ said a supervisor.
TIMES – A driver who witnessed a car crash in Belchamp Otten, Essex, let a young girl sit in his car while awaiting the ambulance. When
paramedics arrived, they considered the girl may have severe spinal injuries and the only safe way to rescue her was to cut off the roof
of the friendly motorist’s car. He was not amused.
PS: Much amused at the cries of horror which have gone up over China’s action in imprisoning agitators during the Olympic Games.
At least they will be spared watching them on TV.
When the investiture of the Prince of Wales was held in Caernarvon I was warned by the Special Branch who had got it into their heads I was a Welsh terrorist that I would be arrested if I was found within three miles of the city. Some genuine, if deeply comic, nationalists were actually put in prison for fear they would disturb the Princely Peace.
Saturday, 26 July 2008
CRIME AND MERRIMENT
In a week that has seen various assaults by the Taffia on what I laughingly call my talents, it was a relief that something I wrote was the source of universal approval. My Hug a Hoodie piece seems to have found a happier response than the opportunist Cameron’s earlier exhortation.
A friend, who is not known for hugging anyone who wasn’t born in Ulster, suggests I should be Prime Minister. Another suggested I could teach the Home Secretary a thing or two.
I have to tell the truth. I owe it all to an illiterate Regimental Sergeant Major. An Irish Guardsman called Kenny.
In 1948 I was a Public Relations sergeant returned to regimental duties because of persistent drunkenness and insubordination on the Airlift. The RSM of my new unit, HQ 7th Armoured Division at Celle in Germany, thought PR must have something to do with Provost so appointed me Provost Sergeant
By this time I had ceased to take the army seriously and resolved to introduce an atmosphere of high comedy.
My first mistake was to sack all my regimental policemen. I replaced them with members of Highland regiments, who abound as orderlies in HQs. I had not realised the reason they abound is that so many have been thrown out of their battalions, as I had, following courts martial offences.
My second mistake was to order the new policemen to send off to their regiments for kilts, which, within a month, re-appeared on the German black market.
My policemen were more dishonest than my prisoners.
Years later in civilian life I had a touching reunion with one of them when I walked out of my office on the Mirror in Manchester and found him trying to break into my car. He had the grace to apologise. He said: “I didn’t know it was your car, sergeant.”
I also had a kind of reunion with one of my regular prisoners, Private Hardisty.
I have always been obsessed with the Black Watch (RHR), an obsession I must admit the Black Watch does not share. So eloquent was I that Hardisty, who came from the Bull Ring in Leeds, vowed he was going “to soldier”, as the quaint phrase had it. When he got out of my guard room he was going to volunteer for the Highland Division.
I was on demob leave when I opened my Daily Express to see his evil face glaring out at me. He had lasted in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders for a month before being thrown out as “undesirable”. He was posted to Berlin, where power was shared with the Americans and the Russians. The Red Army at the time had agents provocateurs touring Berlin bars urging disaffected Allied soldiers to defect with the promise of 24 hour vodka and unlimited sex.
When I read that they had got Hardisty I knew the communist threat was over. The system was doomed.
The Daily Express recounted how alone of all the disaffected soldiery Hardisty was the only one the Russians ever gave back. With, I imagine, collective sighs of relief.
My favourite prisoner was a private soldier called Maplestone. He was one of those unfortunates whose well meaning efforts always landed him in trouble. I was very fond of him and used to give him pleasant jobs when he was in the guard room.
One was to paint the white boundary stones which were placed on either side of the main road through the camp. Panicking at an approaching party of officers, he dropped the paint and prepared to salute. Unfortunately the party spilt. Some officers went to one side of the road, some the other.
As they approached, Maplestone was struck with blind panic and walked through the party saluting with both hands. The officers got into a huff, thought he was being insubordinate and put him on a charge.
Having been banged up myself, I had great sympathy with my prisoners. I introduced a system where they could have a night out in the town, as long as they were accompanied by a regimental policeman whose beer they were required to buy.
It was a great success. Not a single prisoner let me down. To a man they were back in camp before midnight. The regimental policemen, alas, were not so punctilious. Though, in fairness, they were usually back by the weekend.
The least belligerent of men, I have always found my friends amongst life’s Hard Men. In truth I have preferred them to the law abiding.
So much easier to deal with and, in an odd way, more honourable. All you have to do is make them laugh. It disarms them in a minute
Alas, it did not work the night a disaffected soldier set fire to the Headquarters.
The soldier, an acting sergeant, had been posted to the HQ to discover he had dropped a rank in favour of a friend of the department in which he was to serve.
Late one night he returned to his barrack room and told a fellow corporal, “I have just set fire to the barracks.”
“The RSM won’t like that,” the other corporal replied.
“Too bloody true he won’t,” the arsonist told him. “I have locked him in Q Block.”
It reflects no credit on the Unit Fire Service that when they were at last deployed they saw the RSM gesturing frantically at an office window and knocked him over several times with a well directed hose.
Against my advice, the Orderly Officer not only turned out the guard: he insisted on turning out my Regimental Police. He was not to know that the policeman he detailed to direct the civilian Celle fire engines was probably the only Gordon Highlander who was an IRA sympathiser and promptly directed them out of the back gate.
I have no doubt the officer’s intentions were good when he ordered my MPs to detain any civilians they found near the camp. Some irate night workers were brought in from a bus stop which was over half a mile from the camp gates
Within minutes my guard room was filled with outraged citizens and it wasn’t easy to control them since three of my policemen went absent, never to return.
I am afraid I was a failure in every department and in many ways it was a relief to lose a stripe and the job in consequence of being very rude to the RSM. I blush to admit he lusted after me and when his overtures failed, turned nasty. To be honest, as a practising heterosexual I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. But there was no doubt about his desire for revenge.
When I was demobbed I kept my regimental issue kilt and handed in to the Quartermaster a kilt my mother had bought from a small ad in the Manchester Evening News.
I thought I was safe enough because the nearest battalion of my regiment was across Germany in Duisburg.
Alas, the RSM searched until he found a passing Black Watch (RHR) officer on Celle station whom he called on to identify the kilt. Trying to save me, the officer insisted it was “issue”.
“When was it issued?” asked the RSM.
“Judging by the regimental number, 1917,” the officer admitted.
end
I did my first published interview on VE Day in 1945. .For the next half century scarcely a day passed when I didn’t do one - for radio, TV, newspapers. My books are extended interviews with people, or other books.
But it took me forty years to become an interviewer. I have recounted how. I fell asleep in the middle of an interview for a Radio 4 series and how for the first and only time in my life the office was inundated with letters praising my interviewing technique. “At last,” they all said, “an interviewer who isn’t for ever interrupting.
Received radio wisdom is that answers should be kept short. Otherwise listeners get bored.
Rubbish.
Interview questions should be spurs in the flank of monologues. The interviewer is the jockey - a sort of horseman of the puckered lip. If you can see him, even in your mind’s eye, he has failed.
On Radio Wales, Vincent Kane was a superlative interviewer. He left space for answers. So did a man called Gerry Monte, and a few others like Michael Parkinson, Libby Purves, Edward Lustig and quirky Ray Gosling. I am afraid Jonathon Ross does not qualify in any respect as an interviewer.
Nevertheless, his style of knockabout comedy is thought to be the matrix.
The interviewer is the star. His questions swirl like a matador’s red cape as he taunts the bull in a suit of too bright lights.........I do sometimes wish they could fall asleep and give the other chap a chance.
We don’t get interviews. We get cross talk acts between John Humphrys and various elephantine politicians, even crosser talk acts between Paxman’s eyebrows and more politicians. But they never seem to elicit any information. The interviewee simply ignores the question.
I wonder if the broadcast media is right to concentrate almost exclusively on politics. I know it is a cheap way to fill air time. but I don’t know anyone who listens enthralled.
Perhaps I am also wrong in believing that interviewing should not be part of the entertainment industry, which it plainly has become.
I would have thought that if satellite news bulletins and “barely live five” proved anything, they prove there isn’t enough news about (or news they can afford to get) to nourish a rolling news coverage.
The reason the first popular papers included features is there wasn’t enough news to fill a paper. In the old days BBC announcers would sometimes come on, announce the nine o’clock news and say, “There is no news today. Goodnight.”
News is just another fix. We are used to getting it at stated times, like the six o’clock gin of happy memory; and we think we cannot do without it.
Even more depressing, we copy the Oompah Whimpering show where you manufacture news by bringing together stage villains or antagonists and inviting them to fight whilst the audience boos and cheers.
……………………………………………………………………………..
DANGEROUS CUTTINGS
At a time when our unlucky Prime Minister shows the common touch by holidaying in the British Seaside at a £4,000 a week guest house, it is worth recalling Matthew Parris writing in the Times on his predecessor.
“John Smith died at precisely the right moment for Mr Blair’s career. Then the Tory Party imploded. He inherited a strong and strengthening economy. The recession which would have smashed all his reckless election pledges never came. Potential rivals faltered or were undone. He squeaked through his referendum on the Welsh Assembly. The single currency bandwagon hit the kerb before he had time to climb aboard. The crazy campaign in Kosovo was saved when Milosevic buckled. How much longer can this guy’s luck hold?”
A friend, who is not known for hugging anyone who wasn’t born in Ulster, suggests I should be Prime Minister. Another suggested I could teach the Home Secretary a thing or two.
I have to tell the truth. I owe it all to an illiterate Regimental Sergeant Major. An Irish Guardsman called Kenny.
In 1948 I was a Public Relations sergeant returned to regimental duties because of persistent drunkenness and insubordination on the Airlift. The RSM of my new unit, HQ 7th Armoured Division at Celle in Germany, thought PR must have something to do with Provost so appointed me Provost Sergeant
By this time I had ceased to take the army seriously and resolved to introduce an atmosphere of high comedy.
My first mistake was to sack all my regimental policemen. I replaced them with members of Highland regiments, who abound as orderlies in HQs. I had not realised the reason they abound is that so many have been thrown out of their battalions, as I had, following courts martial offences.
My second mistake was to order the new policemen to send off to their regiments for kilts, which, within a month, re-appeared on the German black market.
My policemen were more dishonest than my prisoners.
Years later in civilian life I had a touching reunion with one of them when I walked out of my office on the Mirror in Manchester and found him trying to break into my car. He had the grace to apologise. He said: “I didn’t know it was your car, sergeant.”
I also had a kind of reunion with one of my regular prisoners, Private Hardisty.
I have always been obsessed with the Black Watch (RHR), an obsession I must admit the Black Watch does not share. So eloquent was I that Hardisty, who came from the Bull Ring in Leeds, vowed he was going “to soldier”, as the quaint phrase had it. When he got out of my guard room he was going to volunteer for the Highland Division.
I was on demob leave when I opened my Daily Express to see his evil face glaring out at me. He had lasted in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders for a month before being thrown out as “undesirable”. He was posted to Berlin, where power was shared with the Americans and the Russians. The Red Army at the time had agents provocateurs touring Berlin bars urging disaffected Allied soldiers to defect with the promise of 24 hour vodka and unlimited sex.
When I read that they had got Hardisty I knew the communist threat was over. The system was doomed.
The Daily Express recounted how alone of all the disaffected soldiery Hardisty was the only one the Russians ever gave back. With, I imagine, collective sighs of relief.
My favourite prisoner was a private soldier called Maplestone. He was one of those unfortunates whose well meaning efforts always landed him in trouble. I was very fond of him and used to give him pleasant jobs when he was in the guard room.
One was to paint the white boundary stones which were placed on either side of the main road through the camp. Panicking at an approaching party of officers, he dropped the paint and prepared to salute. Unfortunately the party spilt. Some officers went to one side of the road, some the other.
As they approached, Maplestone was struck with blind panic and walked through the party saluting with both hands. The officers got into a huff, thought he was being insubordinate and put him on a charge.
Having been banged up myself, I had great sympathy with my prisoners. I introduced a system where they could have a night out in the town, as long as they were accompanied by a regimental policeman whose beer they were required to buy.
It was a great success. Not a single prisoner let me down. To a man they were back in camp before midnight. The regimental policemen, alas, were not so punctilious. Though, in fairness, they were usually back by the weekend.
The least belligerent of men, I have always found my friends amongst life’s Hard Men. In truth I have preferred them to the law abiding.
So much easier to deal with and, in an odd way, more honourable. All you have to do is make them laugh. It disarms them in a minute
Alas, it did not work the night a disaffected soldier set fire to the Headquarters.
The soldier, an acting sergeant, had been posted to the HQ to discover he had dropped a rank in favour of a friend of the department in which he was to serve.
Late one night he returned to his barrack room and told a fellow corporal, “I have just set fire to the barracks.”
“The RSM won’t like that,” the other corporal replied.
“Too bloody true he won’t,” the arsonist told him. “I have locked him in Q Block.”
It reflects no credit on the Unit Fire Service that when they were at last deployed they saw the RSM gesturing frantically at an office window and knocked him over several times with a well directed hose.
Against my advice, the Orderly Officer not only turned out the guard: he insisted on turning out my Regimental Police. He was not to know that the policeman he detailed to direct the civilian Celle fire engines was probably the only Gordon Highlander who was an IRA sympathiser and promptly directed them out of the back gate.
I have no doubt the officer’s intentions were good when he ordered my MPs to detain any civilians they found near the camp. Some irate night workers were brought in from a bus stop which was over half a mile from the camp gates
Within minutes my guard room was filled with outraged citizens and it wasn’t easy to control them since three of my policemen went absent, never to return.
I am afraid I was a failure in every department and in many ways it was a relief to lose a stripe and the job in consequence of being very rude to the RSM. I blush to admit he lusted after me and when his overtures failed, turned nasty. To be honest, as a practising heterosexual I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. But there was no doubt about his desire for revenge.
When I was demobbed I kept my regimental issue kilt and handed in to the Quartermaster a kilt my mother had bought from a small ad in the Manchester Evening News.
I thought I was safe enough because the nearest battalion of my regiment was across Germany in Duisburg.
Alas, the RSM searched until he found a passing Black Watch (RHR) officer on Celle station whom he called on to identify the kilt. Trying to save me, the officer insisted it was “issue”.
“When was it issued?” asked the RSM.
“Judging by the regimental number, 1917,” the officer admitted.
end
I did my first published interview on VE Day in 1945. .For the next half century scarcely a day passed when I didn’t do one - for radio, TV, newspapers. My books are extended interviews with people, or other books.
But it took me forty years to become an interviewer. I have recounted how. I fell asleep in the middle of an interview for a Radio 4 series and how for the first and only time in my life the office was inundated with letters praising my interviewing technique. “At last,” they all said, “an interviewer who isn’t for ever interrupting.
Received radio wisdom is that answers should be kept short. Otherwise listeners get bored.
Rubbish.
Interview questions should be spurs in the flank of monologues. The interviewer is the jockey - a sort of horseman of the puckered lip. If you can see him, even in your mind’s eye, he has failed.
On Radio Wales, Vincent Kane was a superlative interviewer. He left space for answers. So did a man called Gerry Monte, and a few others like Michael Parkinson, Libby Purves, Edward Lustig and quirky Ray Gosling. I am afraid Jonathon Ross does not qualify in any respect as an interviewer.
Nevertheless, his style of knockabout comedy is thought to be the matrix.
The interviewer is the star. His questions swirl like a matador’s red cape as he taunts the bull in a suit of too bright lights.........I do sometimes wish they could fall asleep and give the other chap a chance.
We don’t get interviews. We get cross talk acts between John Humphrys and various elephantine politicians, even crosser talk acts between Paxman’s eyebrows and more politicians. But they never seem to elicit any information. The interviewee simply ignores the question.
I wonder if the broadcast media is right to concentrate almost exclusively on politics. I know it is a cheap way to fill air time. but I don’t know anyone who listens enthralled.
Perhaps I am also wrong in believing that interviewing should not be part of the entertainment industry, which it plainly has become.
I would have thought that if satellite news bulletins and “barely live five” proved anything, they prove there isn’t enough news about (or news they can afford to get) to nourish a rolling news coverage.
The reason the first popular papers included features is there wasn’t enough news to fill a paper. In the old days BBC announcers would sometimes come on, announce the nine o’clock news and say, “There is no news today. Goodnight.”
News is just another fix. We are used to getting it at stated times, like the six o’clock gin of happy memory; and we think we cannot do without it.
Even more depressing, we copy the Oompah Whimpering show where you manufacture news by bringing together stage villains or antagonists and inviting them to fight whilst the audience boos and cheers.
……………………………………………………………………………..
DANGEROUS CUTTINGS
At a time when our unlucky Prime Minister shows the common touch by holidaying in the British Seaside at a £4,000 a week guest house, it is worth recalling Matthew Parris writing in the Times on his predecessor.
“John Smith died at precisely the right moment for Mr Blair’s career. Then the Tory Party imploded. He inherited a strong and strengthening economy. The recession which would have smashed all his reckless election pledges never came. Potential rivals faltered or were undone. He squeaked through his referendum on the Welsh Assembly. The single currency bandwagon hit the kerb before he had time to climb aboard. The crazy campaign in Kosovo was saved when Milosevic buckled. How much longer can this guy’s luck hold?”
Saturday, 19 July 2008
Tea is for Thugs
I have watched the creation of a knife carrying thug from babyhood to manhood and I am here to tell you, frankly, the new Home Office measures to combat knife crime are risible.
We bought a ruin of a cottage on Anglesey and arrived there one day to find it occupied by a group of infants, carrying a Welsh flag. There was a great deal of anti-English feeling at the time and my wife said in horror, “It’s a sit in.”
In those early days “sits in” were conducted according to a strict protocol. The sitters usually asked permission of the owner after promising there would be no damage.
I had just done a story about a sit in on the Lleyn. Returning the key, the sitter congratulated the owner on his Peter Scott painting. “I haven’t got a Peter Scott painting,” said the owner. “Duw, “cried the anguished sitter, “we been sitting in the wrong house.”
The idea of a sit in where the average age was six had the tills ringing in my freelance reporter’s head. Certain page leads all round, I told myself.
Alas, the gang explained that it wasn’t a sit in. Our cottage was their gang hut.
My wife, who is in strict training for sainthood, having explained that we weren’t second homers, told them that they must still use it and when we moved in they must come to tea every Sunday.
They were still coming to tea every Sunday fifteen years later, by which time they were bringing their “wives” and the next generation of thugs. Their behaviour, and that of the children, was impeccable. At Christmas they showered us with presents. They had their own spick and span homes because as soon as a girl got pregnant she was given a council house, which is probably why Britain has the highest number of teenaged mothers in Europe.
Parenthetically, one asked me to be his best man at his wedding. I said: “You have left it a bit late; you’ve got three kids.” “That’s the trouble,“ he said, “the place we’ve got is too small and to get a three-bedroom council house you have to be married.”
By that time they had committed most crimes short of murder and were experts on prison life. They particularly enjoyed Willie Whitelaw’s “short sharp shock” in extra tough prison camps.
“We got meat three times a day,” they told me in wonder. At home they only ever had pheasant, rabbit, hare and salmon, which they poached and they found it boring as a diet
Very keen on his food, Raymond. came to us every year for his Christmas dinner. We discovered subsequently he had gone just as religiously to three more houses. With presents for all.
Trevor, his elder brother, usually spent Christmas in prison. One year there had been a wardens’ strike and prisoners were being held in police stations. Trevor was being held in Wrexham where I had many friends.
So I rang the custody sergeant to get him to put Trevor on the phone so that Raymond could wish him a Merry Christmas.
The Custody Sergeant was outraged. He said, “You should know better…………”
I said, “Come on, it’s Christmas and he’s about five yards away. Put him on the phone.”
He said, “It’s not that. He’s not had his Christmas pudding yet. Can you ring back in half an hour?”
Although Trevor was a kindly soul, he was the most violent. In many ways Neanderthal. Though his younger brothers were not to be messed about with, they were also intelligent, kind and extremely generous. Qualities they hid under a quite frightening exterior.
What turned them from happy infants into brawling thieves?
Principally, I think, because to the village they were the “Cacau”, which is Welsh for ”shit”. Their aim in life seemed to be to live down eagerly to the low expectation the world had of them. “You think I am bad? I will show you bad.”
It was tragic. Trevor, the eldest boy, was the knife wielder and the man who threw a policeman through a shop window. Once he asked me if I had got anything he could do in my garden. Alas, it was December. When I turned him down, he walked into the village pub, picked up the till and ran out with it. He got about five yards before he was dropped in a rugby tackle.
I have been in a military prison so we had a rapport. When he came out of prison I told him he had been a prat. He said: “It’s your fault. If you had given me something to do I would never have pinched it.”
I have an uneasy feeling he was telling the truth. It wasn’t so much criminal intent as relief from boredom.
Raymond, the next boy but one, came out of the womb fighting. He appeared to have no emotions. Yet when his Long Dog drank battery acid and I took him to have it destroyed I have never witnessed a human being so racked with sobs.
The family went to the same school as another young friend, the singer Aled Jones.
Aled, a bright boy and naturally studious (while waiting to go on stage at the Hollywood Bowl he passed the time doing maths homework), benefited greatly from his schooling. The “Cacau” were just ignored. If they played truant there were sighs of relief. Yet one Christmas Raymond gave me a drawing he had done of a motorbike. It was perfect in every detail and I realised that with encouragement he would have made a passable draughtsman or a motor mechanic.
Sadly bikes were his downfall. A good looking boy, he was taken as her lover by a middle class English housewife who had a second home outside the village. She bought him a powerful motorbike and when she dropped him he drove it at speed into the wall of her house. He is now badly disabled, unable to speak.
The biggest problem I had with ‘the gang’ was refusing their gifts of property they had stolen. The richest man in the village, a pillar of the community, had no such reservations.
I bought them a set of sea rods. They were stolen by the police during a routine search of their house.
My wife and I loved them. Shown respect, they bloomed. They concluded that I ws too fat and what I needed was exercise. They not only promised me the pick of their litter of Lurcher pups. Within 24 hours of their birth they brought the litter round in a carrier bag so I could b sure to pick the best, They gardened with me for hours, spent evenings in lively conversation about the countryside of which their knowledge was vast
Based on my experience, I am convinced that (a) prison is the thug’s equivalent of a good “A” Level, (b) short sharp shocks do wonders for their street cred and (c) they form gangs as surrogate families
There a very few born crooks but plenty of vulnerable kids who will prove you right if you do not show them kindness and respect. One hates to agree with Cameron about anything but hug a “Hoodie” worked for us
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Age brings with it a list of Things You Can No Longer Enjoy. At the top comes sex and debauchery, which is rather a relief. But it is not long before it extends to going for walks, eating the foods you love, reading for any length of time before falling asleep, gardening and killing things for sport.
The list is longer for the overweight because you are usually on a diet. In my case it now includes fish and chips and, sadly, in view of my recent hymn of praise, black pudding. As a noble friend of mine says, “Growing old is not for Cissies.”
Some of us deal more successfully with retirement than I have. My chum Revel Barker had a distinguished career in our trade as managing editor and Consigliore to the infamous Bob Maxwell.
In retirement he bought Hitler’s pinnace, moved to Malta and has now set up as a publisher His fourth book in a year is coming out soon. He specialises in reprinting classic books by newspapermen and this one is by Tony Delano, a legendary reporter. It is called “Slip Up” and it tells the hilarious tale of how Fleet Street found the train robber Ronnie Biggs and Scotland Yard lost him.
Newspapermen are not normally kind to each other but when this book was published the Daily Mirror said: “Marvellously funny and told with ease and wit.”
The Times praised “Mr Delano’s astute eye” and went on “his ear is a credit to his profession and his wit is accompanied by the ability to write clear English.”
The New Statesman was ecstatic: “The most useful, intellectually coherent and – yes – serious action study of the British Press that anyone has given us for years…….and hysterically funny.”
£9.99, via Paypal, to Revel Barker Publishing at revelbarker@gmail.com or available at online bookshops It’ll make you (and an old man) very happy by securing a copy.
You might also want to enjoy a good read at;
http://www.northtrek.co.uk
and
http://www.gentlemenranters.com
DANGEROUS CUTTING
“At M.I.T., I learned a great deal about neurons, dendrites, action potentials, and the localization of function, visual perception and transcranial magnetic stimulation.
I learned that you can make a mouse “depressed” by dunking it repeatedly in cold water, by giving it electrical shocks over and over again, by subjecting it to “chronic forced swimming,” or making it experience “social defeat,” by putting a mean mouse in its cage. The latter method is the best way to test antidepressants, because after such a negative social experience it takes a mouse three weeks of drug therapy to recover, an interval that neatly parallels the amount of time antidepressants take to reach their optimal effectiveness in humans.”
Columnist in N.Y.TIMES
We bought a ruin of a cottage on Anglesey and arrived there one day to find it occupied by a group of infants, carrying a Welsh flag. There was a great deal of anti-English feeling at the time and my wife said in horror, “It’s a sit in.”
In those early days “sits in” were conducted according to a strict protocol. The sitters usually asked permission of the owner after promising there would be no damage.
I had just done a story about a sit in on the Lleyn. Returning the key, the sitter congratulated the owner on his Peter Scott painting. “I haven’t got a Peter Scott painting,” said the owner. “Duw, “cried the anguished sitter, “we been sitting in the wrong house.”
The idea of a sit in where the average age was six had the tills ringing in my freelance reporter’s head. Certain page leads all round, I told myself.
Alas, the gang explained that it wasn’t a sit in. Our cottage was their gang hut.
My wife, who is in strict training for sainthood, having explained that we weren’t second homers, told them that they must still use it and when we moved in they must come to tea every Sunday.
They were still coming to tea every Sunday fifteen years later, by which time they were bringing their “wives” and the next generation of thugs. Their behaviour, and that of the children, was impeccable. At Christmas they showered us with presents. They had their own spick and span homes because as soon as a girl got pregnant she was given a council house, which is probably why Britain has the highest number of teenaged mothers in Europe.
Parenthetically, one asked me to be his best man at his wedding. I said: “You have left it a bit late; you’ve got three kids.” “That’s the trouble,“ he said, “the place we’ve got is too small and to get a three-bedroom council house you have to be married.”
By that time they had committed most crimes short of murder and were experts on prison life. They particularly enjoyed Willie Whitelaw’s “short sharp shock” in extra tough prison camps.
“We got meat three times a day,” they told me in wonder. At home they only ever had pheasant, rabbit, hare and salmon, which they poached and they found it boring as a diet
Very keen on his food, Raymond. came to us every year for his Christmas dinner. We discovered subsequently he had gone just as religiously to three more houses. With presents for all.
Trevor, his elder brother, usually spent Christmas in prison. One year there had been a wardens’ strike and prisoners were being held in police stations. Trevor was being held in Wrexham where I had many friends.
So I rang the custody sergeant to get him to put Trevor on the phone so that Raymond could wish him a Merry Christmas.
The Custody Sergeant was outraged. He said, “You should know better…………”
I said, “Come on, it’s Christmas and he’s about five yards away. Put him on the phone.”
He said, “It’s not that. He’s not had his Christmas pudding yet. Can you ring back in half an hour?”
Although Trevor was a kindly soul, he was the most violent. In many ways Neanderthal. Though his younger brothers were not to be messed about with, they were also intelligent, kind and extremely generous. Qualities they hid under a quite frightening exterior.
What turned them from happy infants into brawling thieves?
Principally, I think, because to the village they were the “Cacau”, which is Welsh for ”shit”. Their aim in life seemed to be to live down eagerly to the low expectation the world had of them. “You think I am bad? I will show you bad.”
It was tragic. Trevor, the eldest boy, was the knife wielder and the man who threw a policeman through a shop window. Once he asked me if I had got anything he could do in my garden. Alas, it was December. When I turned him down, he walked into the village pub, picked up the till and ran out with it. He got about five yards before he was dropped in a rugby tackle.
I have been in a military prison so we had a rapport. When he came out of prison I told him he had been a prat. He said: “It’s your fault. If you had given me something to do I would never have pinched it.”
I have an uneasy feeling he was telling the truth. It wasn’t so much criminal intent as relief from boredom.
Raymond, the next boy but one, came out of the womb fighting. He appeared to have no emotions. Yet when his Long Dog drank battery acid and I took him to have it destroyed I have never witnessed a human being so racked with sobs.
The family went to the same school as another young friend, the singer Aled Jones.
Aled, a bright boy and naturally studious (while waiting to go on stage at the Hollywood Bowl he passed the time doing maths homework), benefited greatly from his schooling. The “Cacau” were just ignored. If they played truant there were sighs of relief. Yet one Christmas Raymond gave me a drawing he had done of a motorbike. It was perfect in every detail and I realised that with encouragement he would have made a passable draughtsman or a motor mechanic.
Sadly bikes were his downfall. A good looking boy, he was taken as her lover by a middle class English housewife who had a second home outside the village. She bought him a powerful motorbike and when she dropped him he drove it at speed into the wall of her house. He is now badly disabled, unable to speak.
The biggest problem I had with ‘the gang’ was refusing their gifts of property they had stolen. The richest man in the village, a pillar of the community, had no such reservations.
I bought them a set of sea rods. They were stolen by the police during a routine search of their house.
My wife and I loved them. Shown respect, they bloomed. They concluded that I ws too fat and what I needed was exercise. They not only promised me the pick of their litter of Lurcher pups. Within 24 hours of their birth they brought the litter round in a carrier bag so I could b sure to pick the best, They gardened with me for hours, spent evenings in lively conversation about the countryside of which their knowledge was vast
Based on my experience, I am convinced that (a) prison is the thug’s equivalent of a good “A” Level, (b) short sharp shocks do wonders for their street cred and (c) they form gangs as surrogate families
There a very few born crooks but plenty of vulnerable kids who will prove you right if you do not show them kindness and respect. One hates to agree with Cameron about anything but hug a “Hoodie” worked for us
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Age brings with it a list of Things You Can No Longer Enjoy. At the top comes sex and debauchery, which is rather a relief. But it is not long before it extends to going for walks, eating the foods you love, reading for any length of time before falling asleep, gardening and killing things for sport.
The list is longer for the overweight because you are usually on a diet. In my case it now includes fish and chips and, sadly, in view of my recent hymn of praise, black pudding. As a noble friend of mine says, “Growing old is not for Cissies.”
Some of us deal more successfully with retirement than I have. My chum Revel Barker had a distinguished career in our trade as managing editor and Consigliore to the infamous Bob Maxwell.
In retirement he bought Hitler’s pinnace, moved to Malta and has now set up as a publisher His fourth book in a year is coming out soon. He specialises in reprinting classic books by newspapermen and this one is by Tony Delano, a legendary reporter. It is called “Slip Up” and it tells the hilarious tale of how Fleet Street found the train robber Ronnie Biggs and Scotland Yard lost him.
Newspapermen are not normally kind to each other but when this book was published the Daily Mirror said: “Marvellously funny and told with ease and wit.”
The Times praised “Mr Delano’s astute eye” and went on “his ear is a credit to his profession and his wit is accompanied by the ability to write clear English.”
The New Statesman was ecstatic: “The most useful, intellectually coherent and – yes – serious action study of the British Press that anyone has given us for years…….and hysterically funny.”
£9.99, via Paypal, to Revel Barker Publishing at revelbarker@gmail.com or available at online bookshops It’ll make you (and an old man) very happy by securing a copy.
You might also want to enjoy a good read at;
http://www.northtrek.co.uk
and
http://www.gentlemenranters.com
DANGEROUS CUTTING
“At M.I.T., I learned a great deal about neurons, dendrites, action potentials, and the localization of function, visual perception and transcranial magnetic stimulation.
I learned that you can make a mouse “depressed” by dunking it repeatedly in cold water, by giving it electrical shocks over and over again, by subjecting it to “chronic forced swimming,” or making it experience “social defeat,” by putting a mean mouse in its cage. The latter method is the best way to test antidepressants, because after such a negative social experience it takes a mouse three weeks of drug therapy to recover, an interval that neatly parallels the amount of time antidepressants take to reach their optimal effectiveness in humans.”
Columnist in N.Y.TIMES
Saturday, 12 July 2008
WHAT'S IN A NAME ?........YOU'D BE SURPRISED
Historically some lawyers and many members of parliament have an unsavoury reputation which this week the parliamentarians have shown themselves anxious to retain.
It is interesting that the most venal trade of all, the veterinary surgeon, has escaped opprobrium.
I think I know the reason.
In my view only the atom bomb has been a greater threat to civilisation than TV. Thanks to that devilish invention, violence has become endemic. Our feral young have been encouraged to slaughter each other and aspiration has been replaced by insistence. If we see it we must have it.
The medium affects our judgment in many ways or industry would not spend millions on TV advertising nor would products vanish from shelves after a TV appearance.
Some years ago an amiable Yorkshire vet who looked after my wife’s family’s pets, published a series of moderately successful anecdotes. Anxious to bring out a collected edition, his London publisher hunted round for a title and eventually settled on “All Creatures Great and Small”
It proved a gold mine.
The publishing industry to a man, or more correctly a woman, scratched its hennaed head for biblical titles. I was writing my book on Ken Williams, the policeman naturalist, and I was solemnly assured that it would a best seller if I could establish a biblical connection.
I couldn’t and it wasn’t. However, an ecstatic review in the Police Gazette was read by a Yorkshire policeman who was encouraged to publish his own memoir. That became the TV series “Heartbeat” and I believe he is now a millionaire. It was par for the course in our family. My wife’s book “Prisoners of Santo Tomas” was the acknowledged inspiration for the TV series “Tenko”, though in admitting it, the TV company declined to pay a royalty on the grounds it was “in the public domain”.
The vet’s stories were also made into a TV series that depicted vets as lovable eccentrics who spent their lives with their arms up a cow’s uterus with never a thought about money. It is not sour grapes to say that Herriot had an enviable command of the cliché. The aristocratic eccentric, the wayward charmer, the try harder do gooder and the lovable servant. Surround them with a cast of thousands of well meaning rebel peasants, all speaking impenetrable treacle toffee. Place them in an enviable landscape of empty roads, free of caravans, EC lorries and mechanical diggers. Follow that with interminable series about earnest and often beautiful young people learning how to castrate a newt. The result?
A national perception that all Vets are Good Eggs, and probably Scottish.
Porridge eating philanthropists to a man.
How quickly the perception fades when one of them demands £40 to tell you the cause of death of a five shilling goldfish, as happened to me last week. Or when a pensioner neighbour finds a stray cat which is obviously ill, takes it to the Vet and is charged £218.
“Ah,” you will say, “vets were kinder in my day.”
Rubbish. I have a friend, a vet of the old school, an admirable man who would give you his right arm, and did in fact give me a C C de France split cane game rod. Often sought my advice on books to read and matters of literary style. Yet if I asked him the most innocent question about dog behaviour an iron shutter came down.
TV is at it worst in documentaries. Last week I watched one in which the presenter claimed that Dr Crippen was innocent of his wife’s murder and based it on “ truths” that he claimed to have discovered about the remains found in Crippen’s cellar, which were those of a man and not Crippen’s wife. He also claimed, as a matter for astonishment, that the Scotland Yard man, Inspector True, was corrupt.
I have no doubt Crippen was innocent. A significant number of murderers brought to book by Scotland Yard have proved to be innocent. In fact it was known at Crippen’s trial the remains were those of a man: the judge mentioned it in his summing up.
As to the revelation that True was corrupt, some years ago Dr Howard Taylor, a historian from Nottingham University, conducted a four-year research programme which showed that since the days of Jack the Ripper police forces have been fraudulently massaging crime figures. Until the First World War police efficiency was judged by the LOW number of detections and prosecutions. In consequence crime figures were kept below 90,000 a year and any crimes above that figure were “lost”. From 1880 to 1966 the Director of Public Prosecutions “rationed” murders at a fixed rate of 150 a year, with the connivance of the police.
In 1919 the Government sought for reasons to cut police numbers and budgets. Overnight the crime figures trebled.
Dr Taylor concluded: “It is clear that crime rates have been supply led, rather than demand led, and have little reflection of reality.”
Even traffic deaths, he found, had been manipulated so that they rose precisely in line with the number of extra policemen required.
“All the police did was claim that one sixth of the force was needed each year for traffic duties and the accident rate rose accordingly.”
When I was “doing crime” for The People” scarcely a week seemed to pass without a senior officer going to prison on corruption charges. During the investigation in to the Richardson Brothers’ crime syndicate I was given a tip off that one of the gang, a man called Duval, had kept a diary of his time with the gang,. and I was sent to find him.
I was told on no account to ring the Metropolitan police. So many of them were in the pay of London gangs that the Richardson investigation was being conducted from a rural police station in the Home Counties.
Some years later I was hired by Lord Russell of Liverpool, a celebrated lawyer of the day, to check the alibi of Hanratty who had been hanged for the A6 murder, despite insisting he was in Rhyl at the time.
Hanratty had described the room in a boarding house in Kimnel Street where he had slept. He said it had green shiny wallpaper. The police could not find such a room. When I went with Russell, the landlady, after some pretty impressive questioning by him, suddenly said: “There is a room with shiny green wallpaper. The bathroom. And if I am full I let it out to visitors.”
As Deputy Judge Advocate General to the British Army of the Rhine, Lord Russell was one of the chief legal advisers during the Nuremberg war crime trials held after the end of the Second World War. After our investigation, he was adamant that Hanratty was innocent.
Massaging crime figures? I have told here how the Lord Chancellor’s office at the time of the moratorium on death sentences instructed judges that murder charges were to be reduced, Because there were apparently fewer murders, there was no argument for the retention of the death penalty.
************************************************************
I hear the young shun the black pudding.
No one has less respect for the young than I do. But can this be true? Has the Last Pudding Post been sounded on that tastiest of snacks, the Dracula Butty?
Snack, do I say? Feast, rather. Begin the day with black pudding and you will be a stranger to the shiver. It suffuses the body with the thermal equivalent of a three-bar electric fire.
Summon up its sinew, let loose its blood of warmth, preferably with a back-up team of fried egg and riot shields of genuine Staffordshire oat cake. You are as ten men. Buttressed against the winter blast.
One does not wish to be chauvanist, but the ultimate black pudding is sold on Bury Market in Lancashire. I used to work with a Jewish photographer, who, though heavily disguised in case his Rabbi saw him, never objected to a detour via the pudding stall. He said watching Goyem queueing for a Vampire takeaway did much to strengthen his Zionism.
Distance is nothing. Melton Mowbray is the home of remarkable puddings; a Corwen butcher produced puddings worthy of a day’s march, though their shape upset traditionalists. Afficionados prefer them like pneumatic horseshoes. The Corwen pudding was flat like a Yorkshire pudding.
Amateur eaters might be surprised at the distances over the shopping Savannah the Black pudding Shikari ranges. Those who have signed professional forms with the Pudding Club - if you will forgive the expression - will understand. They would go to the ends of the plate for those delicious islands of marbled fat in the wine-dark sea of blood.
The only controversy is in the cooking. Some maintain puddings are best when lightly boiled. Others argue passionately for slicing and frying on the backs of bacon rashers, already themselves frying in the pan. They insist the heat striking through the bacon achieves the precise temperature to ensure the pudding is cooked as the bacon is turned. Others argue that plunging unprotected puddings into hot fat invites the hard shell, the sign of a careless cook. Still others boil and grill.
Wonderful dish for slimmers. Look at Christopher Lee, the definitive Dracula. Not an ounce of spare fat.
DANGEROUS CUTTING.
POLICE dispatched to a 999 emergency reporting a “bright stationary object” above a caller’s house soon solved the mystery The recording runs as follows.
Control Room: “South Wales Police, what’s your emergency?”
Caller: “It’s not really. I just need to inform you that across the mountain there’s a bright stationary object.”
Control room: “Right.”
Caller: “If you’ve got a couple of minutes perhaps you could find out what it is? It’s been there at least half an hour and it’s still there.”
Control: “It’s been there for half an hour. Right. Is it actually on the mountain or in the sky?”
Caller: “It’s in the air.”
Control: “I will send someone up there now to check it out.”
Caller: “OK.”
A few minutes later, all became clear in the following exchange between the control room and the police officer sent to the scene.
Control: “Alpha Zulu 20, this object in the sky, did anyone have a look at it?”
Officer: “Yes, it’s the moon. Over.”
It is interesting that the most venal trade of all, the veterinary surgeon, has escaped opprobrium.
I think I know the reason.
In my view only the atom bomb has been a greater threat to civilisation than TV. Thanks to that devilish invention, violence has become endemic. Our feral young have been encouraged to slaughter each other and aspiration has been replaced by insistence. If we see it we must have it.
The medium affects our judgment in many ways or industry would not spend millions on TV advertising nor would products vanish from shelves after a TV appearance.
Some years ago an amiable Yorkshire vet who looked after my wife’s family’s pets, published a series of moderately successful anecdotes. Anxious to bring out a collected edition, his London publisher hunted round for a title and eventually settled on “All Creatures Great and Small”
It proved a gold mine.
The publishing industry to a man, or more correctly a woman, scratched its hennaed head for biblical titles. I was writing my book on Ken Williams, the policeman naturalist, and I was solemnly assured that it would a best seller if I could establish a biblical connection.
I couldn’t and it wasn’t. However, an ecstatic review in the Police Gazette was read by a Yorkshire policeman who was encouraged to publish his own memoir. That became the TV series “Heartbeat” and I believe he is now a millionaire. It was par for the course in our family. My wife’s book “Prisoners of Santo Tomas” was the acknowledged inspiration for the TV series “Tenko”, though in admitting it, the TV company declined to pay a royalty on the grounds it was “in the public domain”.
The vet’s stories were also made into a TV series that depicted vets as lovable eccentrics who spent their lives with their arms up a cow’s uterus with never a thought about money. It is not sour grapes to say that Herriot had an enviable command of the cliché. The aristocratic eccentric, the wayward charmer, the try harder do gooder and the lovable servant. Surround them with a cast of thousands of well meaning rebel peasants, all speaking impenetrable treacle toffee. Place them in an enviable landscape of empty roads, free of caravans, EC lorries and mechanical diggers. Follow that with interminable series about earnest and often beautiful young people learning how to castrate a newt. The result?
A national perception that all Vets are Good Eggs, and probably Scottish.
Porridge eating philanthropists to a man.
How quickly the perception fades when one of them demands £40 to tell you the cause of death of a five shilling goldfish, as happened to me last week. Or when a pensioner neighbour finds a stray cat which is obviously ill, takes it to the Vet and is charged £218.
“Ah,” you will say, “vets were kinder in my day.”
Rubbish. I have a friend, a vet of the old school, an admirable man who would give you his right arm, and did in fact give me a C C de France split cane game rod. Often sought my advice on books to read and matters of literary style. Yet if I asked him the most innocent question about dog behaviour an iron shutter came down.
TV is at it worst in documentaries. Last week I watched one in which the presenter claimed that Dr Crippen was innocent of his wife’s murder and based it on “ truths” that he claimed to have discovered about the remains found in Crippen’s cellar, which were those of a man and not Crippen’s wife. He also claimed, as a matter for astonishment, that the Scotland Yard man, Inspector True, was corrupt.
I have no doubt Crippen was innocent. A significant number of murderers brought to book by Scotland Yard have proved to be innocent. In fact it was known at Crippen’s trial the remains were those of a man: the judge mentioned it in his summing up.
As to the revelation that True was corrupt, some years ago Dr Howard Taylor, a historian from Nottingham University, conducted a four-year research programme which showed that since the days of Jack the Ripper police forces have been fraudulently massaging crime figures. Until the First World War police efficiency was judged by the LOW number of detections and prosecutions. In consequence crime figures were kept below 90,000 a year and any crimes above that figure were “lost”. From 1880 to 1966 the Director of Public Prosecutions “rationed” murders at a fixed rate of 150 a year, with the connivance of the police.
In 1919 the Government sought for reasons to cut police numbers and budgets. Overnight the crime figures trebled.
Dr Taylor concluded: “It is clear that crime rates have been supply led, rather than demand led, and have little reflection of reality.”
Even traffic deaths, he found, had been manipulated so that they rose precisely in line with the number of extra policemen required.
“All the police did was claim that one sixth of the force was needed each year for traffic duties and the accident rate rose accordingly.”
When I was “doing crime” for The People” scarcely a week seemed to pass without a senior officer going to prison on corruption charges. During the investigation in to the Richardson Brothers’ crime syndicate I was given a tip off that one of the gang, a man called Duval, had kept a diary of his time with the gang,. and I was sent to find him.
I was told on no account to ring the Metropolitan police. So many of them were in the pay of London gangs that the Richardson investigation was being conducted from a rural police station in the Home Counties.
Some years later I was hired by Lord Russell of Liverpool, a celebrated lawyer of the day, to check the alibi of Hanratty who had been hanged for the A6 murder, despite insisting he was in Rhyl at the time.
Hanratty had described the room in a boarding house in Kimnel Street where he had slept. He said it had green shiny wallpaper. The police could not find such a room. When I went with Russell, the landlady, after some pretty impressive questioning by him, suddenly said: “There is a room with shiny green wallpaper. The bathroom. And if I am full I let it out to visitors.”
As Deputy Judge Advocate General to the British Army of the Rhine, Lord Russell was one of the chief legal advisers during the Nuremberg war crime trials held after the end of the Second World War. After our investigation, he was adamant that Hanratty was innocent.
Massaging crime figures? I have told here how the Lord Chancellor’s office at the time of the moratorium on death sentences instructed judges that murder charges were to be reduced, Because there were apparently fewer murders, there was no argument for the retention of the death penalty.
************************************************************
I hear the young shun the black pudding.
No one has less respect for the young than I do. But can this be true? Has the Last Pudding Post been sounded on that tastiest of snacks, the Dracula Butty?
Snack, do I say? Feast, rather. Begin the day with black pudding and you will be a stranger to the shiver. It suffuses the body with the thermal equivalent of a three-bar electric fire.
Summon up its sinew, let loose its blood of warmth, preferably with a back-up team of fried egg and riot shields of genuine Staffordshire oat cake. You are as ten men. Buttressed against the winter blast.
One does not wish to be chauvanist, but the ultimate black pudding is sold on Bury Market in Lancashire. I used to work with a Jewish photographer, who, though heavily disguised in case his Rabbi saw him, never objected to a detour via the pudding stall. He said watching Goyem queueing for a Vampire takeaway did much to strengthen his Zionism.
Distance is nothing. Melton Mowbray is the home of remarkable puddings; a Corwen butcher produced puddings worthy of a day’s march, though their shape upset traditionalists. Afficionados prefer them like pneumatic horseshoes. The Corwen pudding was flat like a Yorkshire pudding.
Amateur eaters might be surprised at the distances over the shopping Savannah the Black pudding Shikari ranges. Those who have signed professional forms with the Pudding Club - if you will forgive the expression - will understand. They would go to the ends of the plate for those delicious islands of marbled fat in the wine-dark sea of blood.
The only controversy is in the cooking. Some maintain puddings are best when lightly boiled. Others argue passionately for slicing and frying on the backs of bacon rashers, already themselves frying in the pan. They insist the heat striking through the bacon achieves the precise temperature to ensure the pudding is cooked as the bacon is turned. Others argue that plunging unprotected puddings into hot fat invites the hard shell, the sign of a careless cook. Still others boil and grill.
Wonderful dish for slimmers. Look at Christopher Lee, the definitive Dracula. Not an ounce of spare fat.
DANGEROUS CUTTING.
POLICE dispatched to a 999 emergency reporting a “bright stationary object” above a caller’s house soon solved the mystery The recording runs as follows.
Control Room: “South Wales Police, what’s your emergency?”
Caller: “It’s not really. I just need to inform you that across the mountain there’s a bright stationary object.”
Control room: “Right.”
Caller: “If you’ve got a couple of minutes perhaps you could find out what it is? It’s been there at least half an hour and it’s still there.”
Control: “It’s been there for half an hour. Right. Is it actually on the mountain or in the sky?”
Caller: “It’s in the air.”
Control: “I will send someone up there now to check it out.”
Caller: “OK.”
A few minutes later, all became clear in the following exchange between the control room and the police officer sent to the scene.
Control: “Alpha Zulu 20, this object in the sky, did anyone have a look at it?”
Officer: “Yes, it’s the moon. Over.”
Saturday, 5 July 2008
YOU WERE MY SUNSHINE......................
Forced as I am, like that wicked old Cavalier Lord Rochester, from the pleasing billows of debauch on to the dull shore of lazy temperance, there is no point in dining out any more. Except at Chinese New Year, which we celebrated every year when we lived in Wales at the Sunshine restaurant, Menai Bridge, guests of chef/proprietor Louie Tong and Diana Leung.
Chinese food is better eaten with tea than wine. Its names are celebratory enough. Five Willows fish; Chicken Chessmen; Velvet and Satin Chicken, made with golden needles (dried lily flowers) and cloud ears (tasty fungus); Yang Chow; Lion’s Head (sounds more exciting than meat balls); my favourite, Wun Tun, Cloud Swallows, chicken-filled filo pastry, moulded to resemble Imperial Goldfish.
The Chinese take food and drink with becoming seriousness. In his seminal book “The Importance of Living”, the Chinese scholar Lin Yutang lists twenty-one proper moments for drinking tea, including “when the children are at school”. It is bad manners to eat until all are ready or the host says “Sack fen” (nice rice). Rude to point chopsticks upwards or at anyone, but not to spit out bones or lift your bowl to your mouth. When replete, place chopsticks horizontally on plate, not bowl.
Traditionally, Louie Tong is Daai See Fooh, Grand Master of the Culinary Arts “combining the talents of a connoisseur, knowledge of a herb doctor, sensitiveness of a mother-in-law and the benevolence of a clucking hen.”
New Year marks the return of the God of the Kitchen after ascending to heaven to report on his earthly family to Sheung Duy, the Almighty God. Back in those happy days in Wales, we all wore our finery to pay respect to ancestors, family and friends. Happily there was never anyone there from the HSBC, so I was able to omit the tradition of settling all debts.
Talking of which, I was never quite clear why we were invited to share this feast until I discovered I was a dead ringer for the Chinese God of Prosperity, who is mostly belly, though there, alas, the resemblance ends (HSBC managers please note.)
Mind you, the belly helped at the banquet, which included two kinds of soup,Thai chicken salad, Cantonese roast pork, Japanese sushi, potato cakes, chicken wings and tempura, Chinese dumpling, lobster crackers, Dim Sum, spare rib, roast duck, Malay pork satay, Mongolian beef, Indonesian chicken curry, Thai red curry and four different puddings. As George Meredith wisely said, “Kissing don’t last; cookery do!”
One year I won a rabbit in the raffle. Thank Sheung Duy, I did not win a dragon.
MY HEROES REVISITED
Now that the newspaper column has become the Chiltern Hundreds for unwanted editors and their wives, it was a poignant pleasure to read again two of the masters of the genre. (Note to the young or foreign: The Chiltern Hundreds is the office without power given to politicians who have outlived their usefulness but could turn nasty if abandoned.)
“Cassandra at His Finest and Funniest” and “The Best of Mulchrone” have both been re-published by Revel Barker, rapidly becoming Archivist to our Inky Trade.
Inevitably comparisons are made. My own view is that Cassandra had the edge on Mulchrone, which is a bit like saying Byron had the edge on Milton.
I would put Cassandra on a level with the great essayists like Lamb, Hazlitt, Coleridge at his best and de Quincey. And that is the highest compliment I can pay. Only Montaigne reigns supreme. But he, of course, invented the genre. It is a very distinguished genre. Before I downsized my library I had a twenty volume set of British columnists which included Addison and Steele and the great Sam Johnson. His thundering rhetoric on the folly of defending the Falkland Isles was a great comfort during that foolish adventure by Mrs Thatcher to defend a land owned by British Coalite; a war, in which brave men died to save the right to be British of islanders we had just deprived of their passports, fighting an enemy whose officers had been trained at Sandhurst, with the RAF and in the Royal Navy,; an enemy armed with weapons we had sold them. A war for which we were so unprepared and all but lost that we had to hire civilian shipping to ferry our troops. A war the Royal Navy was desperate to fight in the face of proposed cuts in its strength.
In their book.” The Battle for the Falklands” Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins told how Admiral Sir Henry Leach in full Admiral’s regalia storme into a cabinet meeting and insisted the Navy could send a task force.
With a bitter irony the guns had scarcely been silenced before Goose Green ws put up for sale.
Viewed as literature, such columnists as Connor, Mulchrone Ian Mackay and Robert Lynd (who founded their school in the Daily Dispatch) are truer to their roots in Montaigne than the novel has been to its beginnings. From Thomas Deloney, the first novelist, a pedlar who tramped the roads of East Anglia in the days of the real Elizabeth, selling his tales on market stalls., through the “journey” books of Fielding et alia to the last thriller novels of Dickens and Collins, only the detective novel has followed “as the night the day” a discernible succession.
Mulchrone , Connor, Mackay and Lind obeyed Montaigne’s dictum that the only subject he was qualified to write about was himself.
They had his eye for anecdote. He tells of an old woman in his village who was raped by fourteen soldiers and said it was the only time she had ever been pleasured without sin. He busied himself amongst life’s trifles and gave them importance.
Of the four writers under advisement, Mulchrone is, in my view, the best reporter. His account of the Denbigh Pie is my favourite piece of reporting. It is written with love, but with a gimlet eye that misses nothing. He was equally good on greater occasions like the wedding of Princess Alexandra, in which he correctly saw a love match
“Their happiness in each other lit the old stones, dimmed the light of the monster called TV, put pomp in its place.”
And later:
“They smiled their joy right at the great challenging head of the Archbishop of Canterbury. And his Grace of Canterbury just had to smile back (As it was his first wedding in the Abbey he probably welcomed the opportunity) ANYWAY IT WAS AS IF THE NORTH FORELAND HAD BROKEN INTO A GRIN.”
To appreciate that magnificent line you would have had to see Archbishop Ramsay and his profile of a prophet. I would also include Mulchrone’s most famous line “Two rivers flowed…….” But he denied authorship. About the only writer I know who would have been so honest.
Cassandra’s quiver of words was bigger and he used it to deadlier effect on the minutiae of life. His was the definitive description of a hangover: “A hangover is when your mouth tastes like a tram driver’s glove. When your boots seem to be steaming and your eyes burn in their sockets like hot gooseberries.”
He was my favourite food writer. A garden writer par excellence writing “Boots Boots Boots” or boasting about his sunflowers. A truly Great Word War Wager, his invective darkened the skies like the arrow night of Crecy. His hatred of the Christmas Card Artillery was Olympian. “I am an old gunner in the Christmas card Artillery…….”
I only met Cassandra once, when we briefly shared a urinal in Withy Grove. Mulchrone was an old and deeply valued friend. Mackay I met occasionally in the Manchester Arms where he shared a drink with another of my heroes, Whitney Rowland.
Robert Lynd, perhaps the most elegant writer of them all is new to me. He comes recommended by another chum from Daily Mirror days, Colin Dunne, who has earned his own place in this Pantheon
Now Cassandra and Mulchrone stand side by side in brand new suits at my bedside, published by Barker. Only Lynd and Mackay are missing. Though not even Revel with his creative genius can match the first edition of Mackay, which gossips happily with first editions of Connor and Mulchrone in my garden library and contains an actual typescript column.
I once told Victoria de Los Angeles that, if my house caught fire, the first thing I would save would be her recording with Bjorling of “La Boheme”. I lied. I would save Lynd, Cassandra and Mulchrone, and especially Mackay because of that original of one of his columns. I would give a King’s Ransom to own Lynd, Mulchrone and Cassandra originals.
You can get the books from Revelbarker@gmail.com or on any decent online bookshop.
And for two more good reads try
http://www.northtrek.co.uk
and
http://www.gentlemenranters.com
THE BIGGER THEY ARE…………………………………
Internal Revenue Service
Post Office Box 447
Bensalem, PA 19255
Dear Sir or Madam:
For over a year now I have been trying to get a payment of £60, a royalty owed me by Random House. They tell me they cannot pay me until I get an Individual Identification Number from your office.
I have made several attempts to disgorge such a number from you without success. I have sent you my driving licence and my passport, which you have returned with admirable promptitude together with a letter telling me that you cannot accept them, although they were unquestionably issued to me. I have offered you my NUJ life membership card, my BBC pass and my Fenland Fare Concessionary identity card. None has met with your approval.
Now you tell me you cannot issue a number because my passport is out of date. My passport is out of date, as I have explained, because I am 79 and have no desire to re-visit even those few remaining corners of the planet which your country’s foreign policy has not destroyed. A second reason I am not renewing it is that at my age I will not be able to get the insurance to which it would bind me because that would cost me more than the £60 America owes me.
Since the US is already bankrupt and deeply in hock (5 trillion dollars) to China and Japan, amongst other unfriendly countries, hasn’t paid its UN dues for years and owes millions in the East and Europe, I do see there is a national disinclination to pay your debts.
Fear not, I am not going to sue you for my £60.
Things could have been much worse. I could have been writing from New Orleans. As it is, I have an explanation for your administration’s incompetence in its “efforts” to rescue the luckless blacks. I only hope if they get out despite your efforts none of them needs an Individual Identification Number.
Sincerely,
Ian Skidmore
Creditor
DANGEROUS CUTTING………………
(from reader Chris Sheridan who says, No - of course it's not funny. But I did enjoy the community order sentencing)
Ian Noll, 39, rigged up a gas canister in a car to drive to a beauty
spot to kill himself. A court yesterday (mon) heard he had a change of heart but forgot to turn off the canister filling the car with explosive gas. Noll of Garth Villas, Merthyr Tydfil, lit a cigarette and then the car exploded in a ball of flame. He suffered severe burns to his hands and face. At Newport Magistrates Court he, admitted taking his brother's car without consent for his suicide attempt. He also admitted arson
Noll was given a 12 months community order and was ordered to
complete an enhanced thinking skills course. His licence was endorsed
for taking a vehicle without consent.
Chinese food is better eaten with tea than wine. Its names are celebratory enough. Five Willows fish; Chicken Chessmen; Velvet and Satin Chicken, made with golden needles (dried lily flowers) and cloud ears (tasty fungus); Yang Chow; Lion’s Head (sounds more exciting than meat balls); my favourite, Wun Tun, Cloud Swallows, chicken-filled filo pastry, moulded to resemble Imperial Goldfish.
The Chinese take food and drink with becoming seriousness. In his seminal book “The Importance of Living”, the Chinese scholar Lin Yutang lists twenty-one proper moments for drinking tea, including “when the children are at school”. It is bad manners to eat until all are ready or the host says “Sack fen” (nice rice). Rude to point chopsticks upwards or at anyone, but not to spit out bones or lift your bowl to your mouth. When replete, place chopsticks horizontally on plate, not bowl.
Traditionally, Louie Tong is Daai See Fooh, Grand Master of the Culinary Arts “combining the talents of a connoisseur, knowledge of a herb doctor, sensitiveness of a mother-in-law and the benevolence of a clucking hen.”
New Year marks the return of the God of the Kitchen after ascending to heaven to report on his earthly family to Sheung Duy, the Almighty God. Back in those happy days in Wales, we all wore our finery to pay respect to ancestors, family and friends. Happily there was never anyone there from the HSBC, so I was able to omit the tradition of settling all debts.
Talking of which, I was never quite clear why we were invited to share this feast until I discovered I was a dead ringer for the Chinese God of Prosperity, who is mostly belly, though there, alas, the resemblance ends (HSBC managers please note.)
Mind you, the belly helped at the banquet, which included two kinds of soup,Thai chicken salad, Cantonese roast pork, Japanese sushi, potato cakes, chicken wings and tempura, Chinese dumpling, lobster crackers, Dim Sum, spare rib, roast duck, Malay pork satay, Mongolian beef, Indonesian chicken curry, Thai red curry and four different puddings. As George Meredith wisely said, “Kissing don’t last; cookery do!”
One year I won a rabbit in the raffle. Thank Sheung Duy, I did not win a dragon.
MY HEROES REVISITED
Now that the newspaper column has become the Chiltern Hundreds for unwanted editors and their wives, it was a poignant pleasure to read again two of the masters of the genre. (Note to the young or foreign: The Chiltern Hundreds is the office without power given to politicians who have outlived their usefulness but could turn nasty if abandoned.)
“Cassandra at His Finest and Funniest” and “The Best of Mulchrone” have both been re-published by Revel Barker, rapidly becoming Archivist to our Inky Trade.
Inevitably comparisons are made. My own view is that Cassandra had the edge on Mulchrone, which is a bit like saying Byron had the edge on Milton.
I would put Cassandra on a level with the great essayists like Lamb, Hazlitt, Coleridge at his best and de Quincey. And that is the highest compliment I can pay. Only Montaigne reigns supreme. But he, of course, invented the genre. It is a very distinguished genre. Before I downsized my library I had a twenty volume set of British columnists which included Addison and Steele and the great Sam Johnson. His thundering rhetoric on the folly of defending the Falkland Isles was a great comfort during that foolish adventure by Mrs Thatcher to defend a land owned by British Coalite; a war, in which brave men died to save the right to be British of islanders we had just deprived of their passports, fighting an enemy whose officers had been trained at Sandhurst, with the RAF and in the Royal Navy,; an enemy armed with weapons we had sold them. A war for which we were so unprepared and all but lost that we had to hire civilian shipping to ferry our troops. A war the Royal Navy was desperate to fight in the face of proposed cuts in its strength.
In their book.” The Battle for the Falklands” Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins told how Admiral Sir Henry Leach in full Admiral’s regalia storme into a cabinet meeting and insisted the Navy could send a task force.
With a bitter irony the guns had scarcely been silenced before Goose Green ws put up for sale.
Viewed as literature, such columnists as Connor, Mulchrone Ian Mackay and Robert Lynd (who founded their school in the Daily Dispatch) are truer to their roots in Montaigne than the novel has been to its beginnings. From Thomas Deloney, the first novelist, a pedlar who tramped the roads of East Anglia in the days of the real Elizabeth, selling his tales on market stalls., through the “journey” books of Fielding et alia to the last thriller novels of Dickens and Collins, only the detective novel has followed “as the night the day” a discernible succession.
Mulchrone , Connor, Mackay and Lind obeyed Montaigne’s dictum that the only subject he was qualified to write about was himself.
They had his eye for anecdote. He tells of an old woman in his village who was raped by fourteen soldiers and said it was the only time she had ever been pleasured without sin. He busied himself amongst life’s trifles and gave them importance.
Of the four writers under advisement, Mulchrone is, in my view, the best reporter. His account of the Denbigh Pie is my favourite piece of reporting. It is written with love, but with a gimlet eye that misses nothing. He was equally good on greater occasions like the wedding of Princess Alexandra, in which he correctly saw a love match
“Their happiness in each other lit the old stones, dimmed the light of the monster called TV, put pomp in its place.”
And later:
“They smiled their joy right at the great challenging head of the Archbishop of Canterbury. And his Grace of Canterbury just had to smile back (As it was his first wedding in the Abbey he probably welcomed the opportunity) ANYWAY IT WAS AS IF THE NORTH FORELAND HAD BROKEN INTO A GRIN.”
To appreciate that magnificent line you would have had to see Archbishop Ramsay and his profile of a prophet. I would also include Mulchrone’s most famous line “Two rivers flowed…….” But he denied authorship. About the only writer I know who would have been so honest.
Cassandra’s quiver of words was bigger and he used it to deadlier effect on the minutiae of life. His was the definitive description of a hangover: “A hangover is when your mouth tastes like a tram driver’s glove. When your boots seem to be steaming and your eyes burn in their sockets like hot gooseberries.”
He was my favourite food writer. A garden writer par excellence writing “Boots Boots Boots” or boasting about his sunflowers. A truly Great Word War Wager, his invective darkened the skies like the arrow night of Crecy. His hatred of the Christmas Card Artillery was Olympian. “I am an old gunner in the Christmas card Artillery…….”
I only met Cassandra once, when we briefly shared a urinal in Withy Grove. Mulchrone was an old and deeply valued friend. Mackay I met occasionally in the Manchester Arms where he shared a drink with another of my heroes, Whitney Rowland.
Robert Lynd, perhaps the most elegant writer of them all is new to me. He comes recommended by another chum from Daily Mirror days, Colin Dunne, who has earned his own place in this Pantheon
Now Cassandra and Mulchrone stand side by side in brand new suits at my bedside, published by Barker. Only Lynd and Mackay are missing. Though not even Revel with his creative genius can match the first edition of Mackay, which gossips happily with first editions of Connor and Mulchrone in my garden library and contains an actual typescript column.
I once told Victoria de Los Angeles that, if my house caught fire, the first thing I would save would be her recording with Bjorling of “La Boheme”. I lied. I would save Lynd, Cassandra and Mulchrone, and especially Mackay because of that original of one of his columns. I would give a King’s Ransom to own Lynd, Mulchrone and Cassandra originals.
You can get the books from Revelbarker@gmail.com or on any decent online bookshop.
And for two more good reads try
http://www.northtrek.co.uk
and
http://www.gentlemenranters.com
THE BIGGER THEY ARE…………………………………
Internal Revenue Service
Post Office Box 447
Bensalem, PA 19255
Dear Sir or Madam:
For over a year now I have been trying to get a payment of £60, a royalty owed me by Random House. They tell me they cannot pay me until I get an Individual Identification Number from your office.
I have made several attempts to disgorge such a number from you without success. I have sent you my driving licence and my passport, which you have returned with admirable promptitude together with a letter telling me that you cannot accept them, although they were unquestionably issued to me. I have offered you my NUJ life membership card, my BBC pass and my Fenland Fare Concessionary identity card. None has met with your approval.
Now you tell me you cannot issue a number because my passport is out of date. My passport is out of date, as I have explained, because I am 79 and have no desire to re-visit even those few remaining corners of the planet which your country’s foreign policy has not destroyed. A second reason I am not renewing it is that at my age I will not be able to get the insurance to which it would bind me because that would cost me more than the £60 America owes me.
Since the US is already bankrupt and deeply in hock (5 trillion dollars) to China and Japan, amongst other unfriendly countries, hasn’t paid its UN dues for years and owes millions in the East and Europe, I do see there is a national disinclination to pay your debts.
Fear not, I am not going to sue you for my £60.
Things could have been much worse. I could have been writing from New Orleans. As it is, I have an explanation for your administration’s incompetence in its “efforts” to rescue the luckless blacks. I only hope if they get out despite your efforts none of them needs an Individual Identification Number.
Sincerely,
Ian Skidmore
Creditor
DANGEROUS CUTTING………………
(from reader Chris Sheridan who says, No - of course it's not funny. But I did enjoy the community order sentencing)
Ian Noll, 39, rigged up a gas canister in a car to drive to a beauty
spot to kill himself. A court yesterday (mon) heard he had a change of heart but forgot to turn off the canister filling the car with explosive gas. Noll of Garth Villas, Merthyr Tydfil, lit a cigarette and then the car exploded in a ball of flame. He suffered severe burns to his hands and face. At Newport Magistrates Court he, admitted taking his brother's car without consent for his suicide attempt. He also admitted arson
Noll was given a 12 months community order and was ordered to
complete an enhanced thinking skills course. His licence was endorsed
for taking a vehicle without consent.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
