My chum Blaster Bates defined expert thus: “X is an unknown quantity and spurt is an uncontrollable drip.”
I thought of his dictum this week when I heard a panel of experts agree that war is inevitable. It isn't.
Indeed there are many signs that the taste for war is diminishing. People are rightly shocked at the deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet the combined losses in both wars amount to less than the deaths in a single battle of a battalion in world war one.
That war was far from inevitable. Had Churchill not refused an offer of alliance from the Ottoman Empire, hijacking two Turkish battleships which were being built in British yards, the Turks would not have gone on to form an alliance with Germany, thus encouraging the Kaiser to take on what was then Great Britain.
If Lloyd George, whose family firm of solicitors represented Christian Zionists, had not pushed through the Balfour Declaration, thus ruining negotiations that were going forward between the Zionists and new Arab kings, Feisal and Ibn Saud, for land in Palestine, the seeds would not have been planted of the Israeli/Arab wars. Nor would there be the visceral hatred of the West which dates from the day the Allies went back on their promise to return Arabia to the Arabs. Had the Allies not insisted on unconditional surrender, the First World War would have ended in 1917 and thousands of wasted lives would have been saved. The economy of Germany would not have been wrecked; nor would it, in consequence, have been possible for a corporal called Adolf Hitler to take over a fringe political party and turn a bankrupt country into the Nazi war machine.
It would be a bold strategist who claimed Iraq was inevitable or the campaign in the Afghan Tribal territories. At the time of the Falklands I pointed out that we were sending ships we no longer owned transporting troops to fight for a land owned by British Coalite against an enemy most of whose officer class we had trained. In this I was supported by the great Dr Johnson whose tri- centenary year this is. In1771 he wrote a pamphlet “On Falklands Islands”:
“Beyond this what have we acquired? What, but a bleak and gloomy solitude, an island, thrown aside from human use, stormy in winter, and barren in summer; an island, which not the southern savages have dignified with habitation; where a garrison must be kept in a state that contemplates with envy the exiles of Siberia; of which the expense will be perpetual, and the use only occasional; and which, if fortune smile upon our labours, may become a nest of smugglers in peace, and in war the refuge of future bucaniers. To all this the government has now given ample attestation, for the island has been since abandoned, and, perhaps, was kept only to quiet clamours, with an intention, not then wholly concealed, of quitting it in a short time.
“ ........With what coolness and indifference the greater part of mankind see war commenced. Those that hear of it at a distance, or read of it in books, but have never presented its evils to their minds, consider it as little more than a splendid game, a proclamation, an army, a battle, and a triumph. Some, indeed, must perish in the most successful field, but they die upon the bed of honour, resign their lives amidst the joys of conquest, and, filled with England's glory, smile in death."
Johnson went on to offer a reason that periodically mankind finds war, if not inevitable, then certainly irresistible.
“ The life of a modern soldier is ill represented by heroick fiction. .............. . If he that shared the danger enjoyed the profit, and, after bleeding in the battle, grew rich by the victory, he might show his gains without envy......... how are we recompensed for the death of multitudes, and the expense of millions, but by contemplating the sudden glories of paymasters and agents, contractors and commissaries, whose equipages shine like meteors, and whose palaces rise like exhalations!
“These are the men who, without virtue, labour, or hazard, are growing rich, as their country is impoverished; they rejoice, when obstinacy or ambition adds another year to slaughter and devastation; and laugh, from their desks, at bravery and science, while they are adding figure to figure, and cipher to cipher, hoping for a new contract from a new armament, and computing the profits of a siege or tempest.”
I can think of a number of other self induced wars to which Dr Johnson's wise words might apply.
One wonders what he would make of our present government and the choice we will presently have between Mandelson's malefactors and Cameron's car salesmen. He would be amused, I think, at the assertion of MPs that unless we show we love them, the brightest talents would not be willing to serve in the House of Ill Fame. Ignoring the fact that the Conservatives have a queue of 5,000 for any available seats and jobs in the top five per cent of salaries.
Among them is Rory Stewart. Eton and Oxford educated, he has been a tutor to royalty, an officer in the Black Watch, the deputy governor of an Iraqi province, has founded a charity in Afghanistan and has written two critically acclaimed books, as well as walking across Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, India and Nepal. A cert for High Office? Future Foreign Secretary? Not likely. He has dismayed his Tory bosses by saying publicly the Afghan war is unwinnable and we should get out.
Reticence and a TV profile might have helped Stewart to secure a Government post . The dazzling talent of Joan Bakewell for boring an audience has been harnessed to lead the Elderly to the Frequently Promised Land. Arlene Someonorother has become the first Ballroom Dancing Czar who aims to have us all doing Tai Che in the few parks which are not infested by the Feral Young.
Admittedly it will pass the time for the four million about-to-be unemployed.
To be fair, those ladies cannot make a bigger hash than the Government they join.. I have been looking over my files and the record of this misgovernment is a sorry one.
The Home Office lost its political antennae over 42-day detention without trial. Its immigration statistics are chaotic and a plan for three "titan" prisons was revealed as unfunded, suggesting a serious cabinet failure.
The health department lurched from overspend to underspend as it slid down Europe's hospital infection league table. Education built academy schools at five times the cost of equivalent local council schools, with no noticeable rise in standards. Transport is under lobbyist capture. Environment's most ambitious planning initiatives are in disarray. The Olympics project appears beyond budgetary control.
A survey in the Guardian rated Britain bottom of seven western governments in using computers - everything from procurement to "scrap rates" and negotiating weakness. Whitehall's response was to double spending on consultants by the Office of Government Commerce.
Costs on the ID card and NHS computer projects accelerated beyond the power of audit. And there is no sign of improvement. In areas such as child support, doctor recruitment, defence coordination, illegal immigration and farm subsidies, not millions, but billions of pounds are being wasted.
More recent mistakes have been even more spectacular. Difficult to see how a less talented future government could do worse. It might even curb executives in the City who claim that if bonuses are not paid the best talent will go overseas. In the light of the mess they have made of the economy, I would suggest earlier bonuses did not exactly attract dazzling talent and their mass emigration may be no bad thing. Iceland or Ireland anybody?
I SUPPOSE I SHOULD NOT COMPLAIN............................
It was the 7th of the 8th of 09 and a man in Car Phone Warehouse, who had just taken my camera phone for repair, noticed the date and said “lucky day.”
I did not think so. We had just come from a camera shop to which I had taken my Olympus in which the telescoping lens keeps going in and out. I was told Olympus would charge me a minimum of £120 for repairs or I could buy a new one for £80. In the end I bought a Panasonic FS25 because it was the easiest to operate. My lucky day had already cost me £180. I later sold the camera to my wife for £50 and then discovered that all it needed was a new battery.
We were late getting to the shop because the computer man, who two days ago charged me £80 to install a wireless computer (another £80), did not turn up to speed the machine which is slower now than it was before I got broadband.
I was already upset because I had spent an hour on the phone to India after the Broadband on the main computer rejected my password. I was given a new one but my mail rejected it. Even so, my day wasn't as bad as this one....................
My friend the opera singer Colin Hills, who finds amazing emails, sent it from Germany.
“Rob is a commercial saturation diver for Global Divers in Louisiana. He performs underwater repairs on offshore drilling rigs. Below is an E-mail he sent to his sister. She then sent it to a radio station in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, who was sponsoring a worst job experience contest. Needless to say, she won.
" Hi Sue, Just another note from your bottom-dwelling brother. Last week I had a bad day at the office. I know you've been feeling down lately at work, so I thought I would share my dilemma with you to make you realize it's not so bad after all. Before I can tell you what happened to me, I first must bore you with a few technicalities of my job. As you know, my office lies at the bottom of the sea. I wear a suit to the office. It's a wetsuit. This time of year the water is quite cool. So what we do to keep warm is this: We have a diesel-powered industrial water heater. This $20,000 piece of equipment sucks the water out of the sea, heats it to a delightful temperature, then pumps it down to the diver through a garden hose which is taped to the air hose. Now this sounds like a darn good plan, and I've used it several times with no complaints. What I do, when I get to the bottom and start working, is take the hose and stuff it down the back of my wetsuit. This floods my whole suit with warm water. It's like working in a Jacuzzi. Everything was going well until all of a sudden, my bum started to itch. So, of course, I scratched it. This only made things worse. Within a few seconds my bum started to burn! I pulled the hose out from my back, but the damage was done. In agony I realized what had happened. The hot water machine had sucked up a jellyfish and pumped it into my suit. Now, since I don't have any hair on my back, the jellyfish couldn't stick to it. However, the crack of my bum was not as fortunate. When I scratched what I thought was an itch, I was actually grinding the jellyfish into the crack of my bum. I informed the dive supervisor of my dilemma over the communicator. His instructions were unclear due to the fact that he, along with five other divers, were all laughing hysterically. Needless to say I aborted the dive. I was instructed to make three agonizing in-water decompression stops totalling thirty-five minutes before I could reach the surface to begin my chamber dry decompression. When I arrived at the surface, I was wearing nothing but my brass helmet. As I climbed out of the water, the medic, with tears of laughter running down his face, handed me a tube of cream and told me to rub it on my bum as soon as I got in the chamber. The cream put the fire out, but I couldn't poo for two days because my bum was swollen shut. So, next time you're having a bad day at work, think about how much worse it would be if you had a jellyfish shoved up your arse. Now repeat to yourself, I love my job, I love my job, I love my job. Remember whenever you have a bad day, ask yourself, is this a jellyfish bad day? May you NEVER have a jellyfish bad day!!!!!
Friday, 14 August 2009
Saturday, 8 August 2009
The Very Moveable Feast
You are not even safe when you are dead. I always believed that “A Moveable Feast”, Ernest Hemingway's account of his early days in Paris, was, “Fiesta” and his short stories apart, one of the best things he did. But his descendants aren't happy with it. They claim he was unfair on his second wife Pauline Pfeiffer. They have re-written it and plan to publish it this week.
I didn't believe everything in it, of course. He was never as poor as he claimed: he was the Paris staffer for a Canadian newspaper. Scott Fitzgerald might have been reassured about his minute private parts after Hemingway took him to see the nude Greek statues in the Louvre or Hemingway could have made it up. But you could still smell the new bread in the boulangerie he described and hear the stairs creak in the attic he rented next to a timber yard. When I was last there, the timber yard was still open and you could still rent rooms in the slum next door; and I had a drink in his local on the corner, with its statue of Marshal Ney everlastingly prancing his horse on the pavement outside.
The book described the dream that all young would- be authors play over and over in their minds of a bohemian life with a lovely companion in that most romantic of cities. That is until they discover that the greatest fiction about Paris IS Paris.
Hemingway claimed Paris was a moveable feast that stayed with you all your life. I think he was talking about the bars.
A favourite pub is the same pub in different cities. When I introduced Hoagy Carmichael to the Liverpool Press Club, he said: “I have been here before in New York and San Francisco.”
It need not even be a pub. For me, in Montmartre, it was a wine shop. In Trastevere, Rome, a grocer’s where I went to buy a bottle, stayed to taste and was still leaning on the counter four hours later. In Amsterdam I had two: the Fockine, where tradition demands you pick up your gin glass in your teeth and if you can't find it do not like to ask for it by name. The other, Harry’s Bar, a Brown Cafe, owned by Christina, a hospitable, torrentially talkative, deliciously dotty Dickens’ devotee. In Bruges, the Cafe Chagall where the menu is bigger than the bar.
In Vienna I added another. A champagne bar, the Reiss, not far from the Cafe Mozart, where the ghost of Karas is probably endlessly playing that damned zither. It hides behind a twenty-foot high champagne bottle and sells sekt, excellent Austrian champagne at g and t prices, with Sinatra, Ella and Armstrong playing quietly in the background to the chic and shapely clientele.
You can tell when you strike a favourite bar. The surroundings look familiar, and the first time you go in, the barman, in this case called Hans, treats you as though you have been a regular for years; the other customers nod amiably and make room at the bar.
My first favourite pub was the Red Lion in Withington, Manchester, where I was a regular from the age of five. My father always took me with him when he went to play bowls before Sunday dinner. He would allow me to sip from his pint. My mother was very shocked but he reassured her by telling her I wouldn't rush into the pub when I was 18 to satisfy my curiosity. Little did he know that I couldn't wait until I was 18 when I could get the full pint rather than a dainty sip. It was the pub where I constantly expected to see the late President Eisenhower. His press secretary Jimmy Hagerty, a pal of mine, was impressed when I told him how my old man once fell out with his friend Albert Turtle because he believed Albert was letting the side down by bringing his wife out for a drink every Thursday in the Red Lion. Not that Albert brought her into the vault. That would have been unthinkable. He put her in the best room whilst he sat in the vault with my dad, sending her an hourly milk stout. Hagerty asked if I minded him passing on the story to the President, who was heavily henpecked by his formidable missus Mame. The next night Hagerty told me that Eisenhower, if ever he came to Manchester, would like to shake my old man by the hand.
A POEM FROM A SOLDIER POET
Tommy Atkins (with apologies to Kipling) Written by Patrick Campbell
They flew me 'ome from Baghdad with a bullet in me chest.Cos they've closed the army 'ospitals, I'm in the NHS.
The nurse, she ain't no Britisher an' so she ain't impressed.It's like I'm some street corner thug who's come off second best.
Yes, it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "You're not welcome 'ere".But when Saddam was collar'd, they was quick enough to cheer.
They're proud when Tommy Atkins 'olds the thin red line out there,
But now he's wounded back at 'ome, he has to wait for care.
Some stranger in the next bed sez, "Don't you feel no shame?You kill my Muslim brothers!"
So it's me not 'im to blame!
An' then the cleaner ups an' sez "Who are you fightin' for?It ain't for Queen and country 'cos it's Bush's bloody war!
"It's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, what's that smell?"But it's "God go with you, Tommy," when they fly us out to 'ell.
O then we're just like 'eroes from the army's glorious past.
Yes, it's "God go with you, Tommy," when the trip might be your last.
They pays us skivvy wages, never mind we're sitting ducks,
When clerks what's pushing pens at 'ome don't know their flippin' luck.
"Ah, yes" sez they "but think of all the travel to be 'ad.
"Pull the other one. Does Cooks do 'olidays in Baghdad?
It's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, know your place
But it's "Tommy, take the front seat," when there's terrorists to chase.
An' the town is full of maniacs who'd like you dead toot sweet.
Yes, it's "Thank you, Mr Atkins," when they find you in the street.
There's s'pposed to be a covynant to treat us fair an' square
But I 'ad to buy me army boots, an' me combats is threadbare.
An' 'alf the bloody 'elicopters can't get in the air
,An' me pistol jammed when snipers fired. That's why I'm laid up 'ere
.Yes, it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, "We 'ave to watch the pence
";Bold as brass the P.M. sez, "We spare them no expense.
But I'll tell you when they do us proud an' pull out all the stops,
It's when Tommy lands at Lyneham in a bloomin' wooden box!
AND FINALLY
After being interviewed by the school administration, the prospective teacher said:
"Let me see if I've got this right.'You want me to go into that room with all those kids, correct their disruptive behavior, observe them for signs of abuse, monitor their dress habits, censor their T-shirt messages, and instill in them a love for learning.'You want me to check their backpacks for weapons, wage war on drugs and sexually transmitted diseases, and raise their sense of self esteem and personal pride 'You want me to teach them patriotism and good citizenship, sportsmanship and fair play, and how to register to vote, balance a checkbook, and apply for a job.'You want me to check their heads for lice, recognize signs of antisocial behavior, and make sure that they all pass the final exams.'You also want me to provide them with an equal education regardless of their handicaps, and communicate regularly with their parents in English, Spanish or any other language, by letter, telephone, newsletter, and report card.'You want me to do all this with a piece of chalk, a blackboard, a bulletin board, a few books, a big smile, and a starting salary that qualifies me for food stamps.'You want me to do all this and then you tell me. . . I CAN'T PRAY?
"
I didn't believe everything in it, of course. He was never as poor as he claimed: he was the Paris staffer for a Canadian newspaper. Scott Fitzgerald might have been reassured about his minute private parts after Hemingway took him to see the nude Greek statues in the Louvre or Hemingway could have made it up. But you could still smell the new bread in the boulangerie he described and hear the stairs creak in the attic he rented next to a timber yard. When I was last there, the timber yard was still open and you could still rent rooms in the slum next door; and I had a drink in his local on the corner, with its statue of Marshal Ney everlastingly prancing his horse on the pavement outside.
The book described the dream that all young would- be authors play over and over in their minds of a bohemian life with a lovely companion in that most romantic of cities. That is until they discover that the greatest fiction about Paris IS Paris.
Hemingway claimed Paris was a moveable feast that stayed with you all your life. I think he was talking about the bars.
A favourite pub is the same pub in different cities. When I introduced Hoagy Carmichael to the Liverpool Press Club, he said: “I have been here before in New York and San Francisco.”
It need not even be a pub. For me, in Montmartre, it was a wine shop. In Trastevere, Rome, a grocer’s where I went to buy a bottle, stayed to taste and was still leaning on the counter four hours later. In Amsterdam I had two: the Fockine, where tradition demands you pick up your gin glass in your teeth and if you can't find it do not like to ask for it by name. The other, Harry’s Bar, a Brown Cafe, owned by Christina, a hospitable, torrentially talkative, deliciously dotty Dickens’ devotee. In Bruges, the Cafe Chagall where the menu is bigger than the bar.
In Vienna I added another. A champagne bar, the Reiss, not far from the Cafe Mozart, where the ghost of Karas is probably endlessly playing that damned zither. It hides behind a twenty-foot high champagne bottle and sells sekt, excellent Austrian champagne at g and t prices, with Sinatra, Ella and Armstrong playing quietly in the background to the chic and shapely clientele.
You can tell when you strike a favourite bar. The surroundings look familiar, and the first time you go in, the barman, in this case called Hans, treats you as though you have been a regular for years; the other customers nod amiably and make room at the bar.
My first favourite pub was the Red Lion in Withington, Manchester, where I was a regular from the age of five. My father always took me with him when he went to play bowls before Sunday dinner. He would allow me to sip from his pint. My mother was very shocked but he reassured her by telling her I wouldn't rush into the pub when I was 18 to satisfy my curiosity. Little did he know that I couldn't wait until I was 18 when I could get the full pint rather than a dainty sip. It was the pub where I constantly expected to see the late President Eisenhower. His press secretary Jimmy Hagerty, a pal of mine, was impressed when I told him how my old man once fell out with his friend Albert Turtle because he believed Albert was letting the side down by bringing his wife out for a drink every Thursday in the Red Lion. Not that Albert brought her into the vault. That would have been unthinkable. He put her in the best room whilst he sat in the vault with my dad, sending her an hourly milk stout. Hagerty asked if I minded him passing on the story to the President, who was heavily henpecked by his formidable missus Mame. The next night Hagerty told me that Eisenhower, if ever he came to Manchester, would like to shake my old man by the hand.
A POEM FROM A SOLDIER POET
Tommy Atkins (with apologies to Kipling) Written by Patrick Campbell
They flew me 'ome from Baghdad with a bullet in me chest.Cos they've closed the army 'ospitals, I'm in the NHS.
The nurse, she ain't no Britisher an' so she ain't impressed.It's like I'm some street corner thug who's come off second best.
Yes, it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "You're not welcome 'ere".But when Saddam was collar'd, they was quick enough to cheer.
They're proud when Tommy Atkins 'olds the thin red line out there,
But now he's wounded back at 'ome, he has to wait for care.
Some stranger in the next bed sez, "Don't you feel no shame?You kill my Muslim brothers!"
So it's me not 'im to blame!
An' then the cleaner ups an' sez "Who are you fightin' for?It ain't for Queen and country 'cos it's Bush's bloody war!
"It's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, what's that smell?"But it's "God go with you, Tommy," when they fly us out to 'ell.
O then we're just like 'eroes from the army's glorious past.
Yes, it's "God go with you, Tommy," when the trip might be your last.
They pays us skivvy wages, never mind we're sitting ducks,
When clerks what's pushing pens at 'ome don't know their flippin' luck.
"Ah, yes" sez they "but think of all the travel to be 'ad.
"Pull the other one. Does Cooks do 'olidays in Baghdad?
It's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, know your place
But it's "Tommy, take the front seat," when there's terrorists to chase.
An' the town is full of maniacs who'd like you dead toot sweet.
Yes, it's "Thank you, Mr Atkins," when they find you in the street.
There's s'pposed to be a covynant to treat us fair an' square
But I 'ad to buy me army boots, an' me combats is threadbare.
An' 'alf the bloody 'elicopters can't get in the air
,An' me pistol jammed when snipers fired. That's why I'm laid up 'ere
.Yes, it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, "We 'ave to watch the pence
";Bold as brass the P.M. sez, "We spare them no expense.
But I'll tell you when they do us proud an' pull out all the stops,
It's when Tommy lands at Lyneham in a bloomin' wooden box!
AND FINALLY
After being interviewed by the school administration, the prospective teacher said:
"Let me see if I've got this right.'You want me to go into that room with all those kids, correct their disruptive behavior, observe them for signs of abuse, monitor their dress habits, censor their T-shirt messages, and instill in them a love for learning.'You want me to check their backpacks for weapons, wage war on drugs and sexually transmitted diseases, and raise their sense of self esteem and personal pride 'You want me to teach them patriotism and good citizenship, sportsmanship and fair play, and how to register to vote, balance a checkbook, and apply for a job.'You want me to check their heads for lice, recognize signs of antisocial behavior, and make sure that they all pass the final exams.'You also want me to provide them with an equal education regardless of their handicaps, and communicate regularly with their parents in English, Spanish or any other language, by letter, telephone, newsletter, and report card.'You want me to do all this with a piece of chalk, a blackboard, a bulletin board, a few books, a big smile, and a starting salary that qualifies me for food stamps.'You want me to do all this and then you tell me. . . I CAN'T PRAY?
"
Saturday, 1 August 2009
A SIGNIFICANT OATHER
Poor David Cameron is in trouble for using inappropriate language on Absolute Radio, which, in broadcasting terms, is like shouting down a wet sock.
The cross I have to bear is made of Balsa wood, unlike the heavy oaken ones carried by some of my friends and their wives, Nevertheless it can be irksome and occasionally cause a temporary loss of control. In one such incident I swore in the presence of a nurse. Not at her, thank God ,but in sudden frustration. She was very good about it but I have been shrouded in shame since it happened.
A very odd thing, language. A word is merely an assembly of letters. How, then, can it have personality and the ability to hurt? Long ago when the world was grown up there were jocks and taffs, eyeties and micks, sambos and sheenies, krauts and 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. I suspect the reason The Wire is put on by BBC2 as late at night as they can manage is that the blacks who are shown in a criminal light call each other nigger.
In earlier unreconstructed days there were taboos. 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 fifty years ago). Today broadcasters could get the sack for using such racial labels as the ones I listed above. Yet obscenities are the every day currency of radio and TV, and only old codgers like me get upset.
In the Spectator last week Jan Morris was complaining about the attitude of the English to the Welsh. Although I hold her in high respect, I was angered by her outburst because she also condemned the English who choose to live in Wales. Ms Morris is English. She was born in Swindon and pronounced herself Welsh shortly after she changed sex and the week after my book Owain Glyndwr had set the nationalist dovecotes a-flutter. It meant a great deal when, the only time we have met, by accident in a cafe in Porthmadog, she went out of her way to praise the quality of my research for the book. It was very flattering because her book on Venice, and the trilogy she wrote on the Indian Mutiny, were based on deep and magnificent research.
Alas, the same cannot be said for the research she did for her Spectator outburst. Ms Morris was particularly exercised at the use of the verb 'to welsh'. She claimed it was racial abuse. In the Middle Ages in Wales English law was limited to the castle towns where only Englishmen could trade. 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 in the 'Welshry'. He was said to have 'Welshed'. 'Welshing' insults the English, not the Welsh.
Unacceptable language is a matter of fashion. There was a time when taking the Lord’s name in vain was social death. My father, who swore vividly, nevertheless used to say “Cheese and Rice”. But youngsters no longer regard that as swearing, though they shun words like Paki and Nigger - even though, as I have suggested, the ethnic minorities use those words to describe themselves. I don't understand any of the taboos. I have frequently commented on the fact that my wife had to leave a ladies' football team because she couldn't take the obscene language the girls routinely used.
Years ago I interviewed a member of the BBC Council on a poll it had published on listeners' attitudes to language. Predictably, the 'c' word was rated the most extreme expletive. The 'f' word was in third place after 'motherf.....er', an unhappy American import. But the 897 people questioned were more worried about the words 'spastic' and 'whore' than swear words.
Wanker and bastard came fourth and fifth in the severity poll. The first wasn't considered swearing in my day and the state of bastardy is socially quite acceptable. Why should these nouns shock?Who decided when Jew or spastic should become swear words, as the BBC Poll suggested ? Spastic merely describes a medical condition and Jew has been how Jews have described themselves for over a millennium.
'Bloody' is blasphemy, a contraction of 'By the Blood of Christ'. 'God damn' is a terrible curse, nothing less than. bringing down damnation on another human’s head. I can use those terms anywhere but I cannot say 'whore' which is nothing more than a job description.
Surprisingly, for the majority, it wasn't the language that was unacceptable: it was the time of night it was used. Why should language be good or bad depending on the time it is used? More than that, the context counts. Puzzlingly, people accept it, the BBC man told me,in violent films, comedies and documentaries. Surely if language is unacceptable the context does not matter? To adapt Gertrude Stein, surely “an F is an F is an F”?
My father’s favourite swear words were 'bloody black gaiters' and I too find it very satisfying as an expression of surprise. There are other assemblies of letters, usually Anglo-Saxon and usually describing bodily functions, which do relieve the tensions when used. Perhaps it's something in the assembly of letters? My favourite swear word is 'frass', which, as I am sure you know, is the scientific name for the body waste of a butterfly.
I have a theory. Most of the swear words refer to bodily parts and functions and it is quite surprising how many are corruptions of Anglo-Saxon. The Normans considered Anglo-Saxon a very inferior language and it was never used in polite society. Is our distaste for swear words merely vestigial political correctness and snobbery? Is the distaste for swearing merely racial discrimination?
The cross I have to bear is made of Balsa wood, unlike the heavy oaken ones carried by some of my friends and their wives, Nevertheless it can be irksome and occasionally cause a temporary loss of control. In one such incident I swore in the presence of a nurse. Not at her, thank God ,but in sudden frustration. She was very good about it but I have been shrouded in shame since it happened.
A very odd thing, language. A word is merely an assembly of letters. How, then, can it have personality and the ability to hurt? Long ago when the world was grown up there were jocks and taffs, eyeties and micks, sambos and sheenies, krauts and 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. I suspect the reason The Wire is put on by BBC2 as late at night as they can manage is that the blacks who are shown in a criminal light call each other nigger.
In earlier unreconstructed days there were taboos. 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 fifty years ago). Today broadcasters could get the sack for using such racial labels as the ones I listed above. Yet obscenities are the every day currency of radio and TV, and only old codgers like me get upset.
In the Spectator last week Jan Morris was complaining about the attitude of the English to the Welsh. Although I hold her in high respect, I was angered by her outburst because she also condemned the English who choose to live in Wales. Ms Morris is English. She was born in Swindon and pronounced herself Welsh shortly after she changed sex and the week after my book Owain Glyndwr had set the nationalist dovecotes a-flutter. It meant a great deal when, the only time we have met, by accident in a cafe in Porthmadog, she went out of her way to praise the quality of my research for the book. It was very flattering because her book on Venice, and the trilogy she wrote on the Indian Mutiny, were based on deep and magnificent research.
Alas, the same cannot be said for the research she did for her Spectator outburst. Ms Morris was particularly exercised at the use of the verb 'to welsh'. She claimed it was racial abuse. In the Middle Ages in Wales English law was limited to the castle towns where only Englishmen could trade. 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 in the 'Welshry'. He was said to have 'Welshed'. 'Welshing' insults the English, not the Welsh.
Unacceptable language is a matter of fashion. There was a time when taking the Lord’s name in vain was social death. My father, who swore vividly, nevertheless used to say “Cheese and Rice”. But youngsters no longer regard that as swearing, though they shun words like Paki and Nigger - even though, as I have suggested, the ethnic minorities use those words to describe themselves. I don't understand any of the taboos. I have frequently commented on the fact that my wife had to leave a ladies' football team because she couldn't take the obscene language the girls routinely used.
Years ago I interviewed a member of the BBC Council on a poll it had published on listeners' attitudes to language. Predictably, the 'c' word was rated the most extreme expletive. The 'f' word was in third place after 'motherf.....er', an unhappy American import. But the 897 people questioned were more worried about the words 'spastic' and 'whore' than swear words.
Wanker and bastard came fourth and fifth in the severity poll. The first wasn't considered swearing in my day and the state of bastardy is socially quite acceptable. Why should these nouns shock?Who decided when Jew or spastic should become swear words, as the BBC Poll suggested ? Spastic merely describes a medical condition and Jew has been how Jews have described themselves for over a millennium.
'Bloody' is blasphemy, a contraction of 'By the Blood of Christ'. 'God damn' is a terrible curse, nothing less than. bringing down damnation on another human’s head. I can use those terms anywhere but I cannot say 'whore' which is nothing more than a job description.
Surprisingly, for the majority, it wasn't the language that was unacceptable: it was the time of night it was used. Why should language be good or bad depending on the time it is used? More than that, the context counts. Puzzlingly, people accept it, the BBC man told me,in violent films, comedies and documentaries. Surely if language is unacceptable the context does not matter? To adapt Gertrude Stein, surely “an F is an F is an F”?
My father’s favourite swear words were 'bloody black gaiters' and I too find it very satisfying as an expression of surprise. There are other assemblies of letters, usually Anglo-Saxon and usually describing bodily functions, which do relieve the tensions when used. Perhaps it's something in the assembly of letters? My favourite swear word is 'frass', which, as I am sure you know, is the scientific name for the body waste of a butterfly.
I have a theory. Most of the swear words refer to bodily parts and functions and it is quite surprising how many are corruptions of Anglo-Saxon. The Normans considered Anglo-Saxon a very inferior language and it was never used in polite society. Is our distaste for swear words merely vestigial political correctness and snobbery? Is the distaste for swearing merely racial discrimination?
Saturday, 25 July 2009
I WAS A GET FELL IN OUTSIDER
The Black Watch (RHR) is currently thrashing the Taleban and my chest heaves with pride whilst never missing a news bulletin in fear of deaths in that silliest of wars. Why am I so proud? For most of my national service I managed to keep it a secret that I was in the army by wearing a shoulder badge which read “Military Observer”. I served briefly with a battalion of the Black Watch (RHR). I think it was the 4th/8th territorial battalion but I was always vague on details, not wishing to get too deeply involved in their activities.
At a time when my Mancunian accent could have been used to slice bread, I was asked by another sergeant, a snobby chap in the Education Corps, where I had been at school. With an early attempt at irony, I said, “Eton”. A failed attempt at irony, as it turned out, because he believed me and spread the story and I was treated with great diffidence in the sergeants' mess (soldiers are great snobs) and also by the officers. Most of whom wished they had been to Eton.
I did a fortnight's Z training with the battalion at its summer camp at Fochabers. At the time my only source of income was the £5 I got for a Saturday shift on The News of the World, so I had to send a regrets note to the War Office. I wrote that I couldn't join them on Saturday but would certainly be there on Sunday. Couldn't give a time, because it was a question of trains. I received a very rude reply so I thought, Fochabers you, and caught the night train from Manchester after my shift on the “News”.
Unfortunately at Edinburgh I discovered the highland express did not run on Sundays so I thought I would look up some relatives who had always hoped I was a figment of their imagination. Anyway, what with one thing and another, it was Tuesday evening before I arrived at the camp and they WERE cross.
My first appearance on my first morning with my battalion was in front of the CO. He did not make a good impression. He was about seven foot high, thinner than the cromach he brandished. (I still don't know why senior officers in Highland Regiments carry cromachs. I should think the incidence of sheep on a battlefield was pretty low.)
Anyway, he sentenced me to stay behind for two days after the battalion left for home. Actually we quite enjoyed it, because disreputable friends I had made were similarly charged. He left an officer behind who had all sorts of interesting things for us to do but we told him to Fochabers off and spent the time in Elgin. Though, not wanting to get him into trouble, we always slept in the camp.
I think the CO was puzzled by my discharge papers which read, “Sergeant Skidmore is a first class NCO”. But the 'sergeant' had been crossed out and 'corporal' written in its stead. 'Corporal' had also been crossed out and the final entry read: “Private Skidmore is a first class NCO.” Anyway, he posted me to "I" company. As always, I fell in with a glad cry to my natural home, which was bad company.
Some quite violent, but they welcomed me, knowing of my conspicuous lack of gallantry. One hard man did square up to me but he just shook his head and said, "It's nae worth it", so we went to the NAAFI.
We had a CSM McComisky who was famous for putting himself on a charge. This keelie said, “Are you no Sgt Major McComisky?""That's right, lad."
"Did you no pit yersel on a charge?"
“Ah dud.""Ye must have been af yr feckin heed."My little group must have been having a bad effect on the rest of the battalion because the chap with the cromach called a Commanding Officer's Parade. Put on music and everything. Obviously intent on a morale-building exercise.
"Chaps,” he said.
"Chaps?" said the man next to me. "Thinks he's bliddy John Wayne."
"Some of you, I know, are feeling resentful that you have been torn from your families and your homes to train with us. But look to your right and your left (we did and got a bollocking from theRSM for turning our heads) and you will see old friends, perhaps chaps you served with at St Valery (we averaged 20 years old)”.
The chap next to me was not strong on regimental history and thought St Valery was a catholic church. "Ahm nae feckin papist," he growled.
Then the CO advanced towards us, flanked by his officers, and we all nervously took a pace back. But he caught up with us in the end and beamed down at the keelie next to me, who, I should explain, was Glasgow height (where if you are taller than four feet you get posted out). He was usually invisible under a tam o' shanter the size of a cheese wheel.
"I seem to recognise your face," said the CO unwisely. Which was a lie, anyway, because none of us had seen it under his giant bonnet.
The T o' S went vertical and a pair of wily eyes appeared.
"Ave nivir seen ye in my bliddy life, Jock," he said.
I got home eventually and a few days later I got a very nice letter from the CO saying I was obviously unhappy in the regiment and they were posting me out.So when World War 3 breaks out I won't know where to go.
THE GENTLE RAIN
Knutsford Scout council member fears rain tax will increase bills
(from the Knutsford Chronicle)
YOUTH groups fear plans for a new rainwater charge will force them to increase subscription fees or cancel activities.
Tony Leadbeater, of Knutsford District Scout Council, said local groups could be forced to pay hundreds of pounds more in bills.
“Places like local Scout headquarters are going to be charged massive amounts for getting rid of rainwater,” he said.
Regulator Ofwat has told water companies to use a new way of charging non-domestic properties.
It wants them to pay for rain that falls onto the building and drains into the water system.
Many youth groups have previously been exempt from the charge.
However, under the new rules all youth groups with their own bases are expected to receive increased bills by next year.
The charge would be based on the size of the property.
Some fear their current charges of about £50 a year could rise to more than £500.
“They’ll either have to put the subscriptions up or curtail their activities,” said Mr Leadbeater.
“It’s not just Scouting that would be hit.”
ON A CHEERY NOTE
Subject: AspirinThis is informative and you probably already know about this.Bayer is making crystal aspirin to dissolve under the tongue. They work muchfaster than the tablets
Why keep aspirin by your bedside?
There are other symptoms of a heart attack besides the pain on the left arm. One must also be aware of an intense pain on the chin, as well as nausea and lots of sweating, however these symptoms may also occur less frequently.
Note: There may be no pain in the chest during a heart attack.The majority of people (about 60%) who had a heart attack during their sleep, did not wake up. However, if it occurs, the chest pain may wake you up from your deep sleep.If that happens, immediately dissolve two aspirins in your mouth and swallow them with water.
Afterwards:- phone a neighbour or a family member who lives very close by- say "heart attack!"- say that you have taken 2 aspirins.- take a seat on a chair or sofa near the front door, and wait for theirarrival and...~ do NOT lie down
A Cardiologist has stated that, if each person, after receiving this e-mail,sends it to 10 people, probably one life can be saved!
Wouldn't forgive myself if I didn't send it
FAN MAIL
I am indebted to Mr Schultz of the U.S. of A for his kind words re my tribute last December to Colonel Warren.
That is extremely kind of you, Mr Schultz. It was a privilege to share Warren's last days with him. As you can imagine, he bore his trials bravely with dignity and with humour. Earlier this year I was diagnosed with cancer myself and his example enabled me to bear it better.
I arranged the first meeting since the war between Warren and my friend Lord Langford. Warren came to Wales to stay with Geoffrey. Over lunch I said I would like to write a sequel to Escape from the Rising Sun, which was Geoffrey's story. After lunch Warren summoned me to his room:
" If you want to write it, okay," he said, "but you had better hurry up, I will be dead in a year."
And he was.
At a time when my Mancunian accent could have been used to slice bread, I was asked by another sergeant, a snobby chap in the Education Corps, where I had been at school. With an early attempt at irony, I said, “Eton”. A failed attempt at irony, as it turned out, because he believed me and spread the story and I was treated with great diffidence in the sergeants' mess (soldiers are great snobs) and also by the officers. Most of whom wished they had been to Eton.
I did a fortnight's Z training with the battalion at its summer camp at Fochabers. At the time my only source of income was the £5 I got for a Saturday shift on The News of the World, so I had to send a regrets note to the War Office. I wrote that I couldn't join them on Saturday but would certainly be there on Sunday. Couldn't give a time, because it was a question of trains. I received a very rude reply so I thought, Fochabers you, and caught the night train from Manchester after my shift on the “News”.
Unfortunately at Edinburgh I discovered the highland express did not run on Sundays so I thought I would look up some relatives who had always hoped I was a figment of their imagination. Anyway, what with one thing and another, it was Tuesday evening before I arrived at the camp and they WERE cross.
My first appearance on my first morning with my battalion was in front of the CO. He did not make a good impression. He was about seven foot high, thinner than the cromach he brandished. (I still don't know why senior officers in Highland Regiments carry cromachs. I should think the incidence of sheep on a battlefield was pretty low.)
Anyway, he sentenced me to stay behind for two days after the battalion left for home. Actually we quite enjoyed it, because disreputable friends I had made were similarly charged. He left an officer behind who had all sorts of interesting things for us to do but we told him to Fochabers off and spent the time in Elgin. Though, not wanting to get him into trouble, we always slept in the camp.
I think the CO was puzzled by my discharge papers which read, “Sergeant Skidmore is a first class NCO”. But the 'sergeant' had been crossed out and 'corporal' written in its stead. 'Corporal' had also been crossed out and the final entry read: “Private Skidmore is a first class NCO.” Anyway, he posted me to "I" company. As always, I fell in with a glad cry to my natural home, which was bad company.
Some quite violent, but they welcomed me, knowing of my conspicuous lack of gallantry. One hard man did square up to me but he just shook his head and said, "It's nae worth it", so we went to the NAAFI.
We had a CSM McComisky who was famous for putting himself on a charge. This keelie said, “Are you no Sgt Major McComisky?""That's right, lad."
"Did you no pit yersel on a charge?"
“Ah dud.""Ye must have been af yr feckin heed."My little group must have been having a bad effect on the rest of the battalion because the chap with the cromach called a Commanding Officer's Parade. Put on music and everything. Obviously intent on a morale-building exercise.
"Chaps,” he said.
"Chaps?" said the man next to me. "Thinks he's bliddy John Wayne."
"Some of you, I know, are feeling resentful that you have been torn from your families and your homes to train with us. But look to your right and your left (we did and got a bollocking from theRSM for turning our heads) and you will see old friends, perhaps chaps you served with at St Valery (we averaged 20 years old)”.
The chap next to me was not strong on regimental history and thought St Valery was a catholic church. "Ahm nae feckin papist," he growled.
Then the CO advanced towards us, flanked by his officers, and we all nervously took a pace back. But he caught up with us in the end and beamed down at the keelie next to me, who, I should explain, was Glasgow height (where if you are taller than four feet you get posted out). He was usually invisible under a tam o' shanter the size of a cheese wheel.
"I seem to recognise your face," said the CO unwisely. Which was a lie, anyway, because none of us had seen it under his giant bonnet.
The T o' S went vertical and a pair of wily eyes appeared.
"Ave nivir seen ye in my bliddy life, Jock," he said.
I got home eventually and a few days later I got a very nice letter from the CO saying I was obviously unhappy in the regiment and they were posting me out.So when World War 3 breaks out I won't know where to go.
THE GENTLE RAIN
Knutsford Scout council member fears rain tax will increase bills
(from the Knutsford Chronicle)
YOUTH groups fear plans for a new rainwater charge will force them to increase subscription fees or cancel activities.
Tony Leadbeater, of Knutsford District Scout Council, said local groups could be forced to pay hundreds of pounds more in bills.
“Places like local Scout headquarters are going to be charged massive amounts for getting rid of rainwater,” he said.
Regulator Ofwat has told water companies to use a new way of charging non-domestic properties.
It wants them to pay for rain that falls onto the building and drains into the water system.
Many youth groups have previously been exempt from the charge.
However, under the new rules all youth groups with their own bases are expected to receive increased bills by next year.
The charge would be based on the size of the property.
Some fear their current charges of about £50 a year could rise to more than £500.
“They’ll either have to put the subscriptions up or curtail their activities,” said Mr Leadbeater.
“It’s not just Scouting that would be hit.”
ON A CHEERY NOTE
Subject: AspirinThis is informative and you probably already know about this.Bayer is making crystal aspirin to dissolve under the tongue. They work muchfaster than the tablets
Why keep aspirin by your bedside?
There are other symptoms of a heart attack besides the pain on the left arm. One must also be aware of an intense pain on the chin, as well as nausea and lots of sweating, however these symptoms may also occur less frequently.
Note: There may be no pain in the chest during a heart attack.The majority of people (about 60%) who had a heart attack during their sleep, did not wake up. However, if it occurs, the chest pain may wake you up from your deep sleep.If that happens, immediately dissolve two aspirins in your mouth and swallow them with water.
Afterwards:- phone a neighbour or a family member who lives very close by- say "heart attack!"- say that you have taken 2 aspirins.- take a seat on a chair or sofa near the front door, and wait for theirarrival and...~ do NOT lie down
A Cardiologist has stated that, if each person, after receiving this e-mail,sends it to 10 people, probably one life can be saved!
Wouldn't forgive myself if I didn't send it
FAN MAIL
I am indebted to Mr Schultz of the U.S. of A for his kind words re my tribute last December to Colonel Warren.
That is extremely kind of you, Mr Schultz. It was a privilege to share Warren's last days with him. As you can imagine, he bore his trials bravely with dignity and with humour. Earlier this year I was diagnosed with cancer myself and his example enabled me to bear it better.
I arranged the first meeting since the war between Warren and my friend Lord Langford. Warren came to Wales to stay with Geoffrey. Over lunch I said I would like to write a sequel to Escape from the Rising Sun, which was Geoffrey's story. After lunch Warren summoned me to his room:
" If you want to write it, okay," he said, "but you had better hurry up, I will be dead in a year."
And he was.
Saturday, 18 July 2009
If Food be the Music of Love...........................
Were my choice of a desert island book to be canvassed, I would unhesitatingly demand Alan Davidson's Dictionary of Food. It is quite simply the most entertaining book I have read in years - and the largest. It is to food what Richard Burton was to Melancholy. It took Davidson,cook, gourmet and former diplomat, and a team of food lovers twenty years to compile and not a moment of their time was wasted. It is crammed to the cover with scholarship, humour and forkfuls of arcane lore on any comestible you care to name.
Fish and Chips? Certainly. Fried fish is a traditional Hebrew dish sold cold on street corners in Victorian times. Not all Davidson's piety nor wit can discover when that happiest of marriages with the chip took place but it probably came to Britain via Ireland. I may be able to help there. Potato chips were a Renaissance dish invented in Florence, the home of gastronomy and the birthplace of the fork. When Marie de Medici of that sublime city married the Throne of France, she was so afraid of being poisoned she brought her chef Ranieri with her(the restaurant he founded in Rome still trades at the foot of the Spanish Steps. Try the Alpine strawberries in red wine). So called French cuisine is Florentine and, I have no doubt, included chips, erroneously claimed as "French fries".
Pikelets are light-weight muffins. The name is a Midlands corruption of the
Welsh bara pyglyd, a griddled batter of flour and milk. The fine old dish
“flummery” began as porridge but by Mrs Beeton's day had become a jellified custard with generous amounts of sherry. Flummery too is a corruption of Welsh, llymru.
The book even solves the mystery of the Welsh singing voice. Leeks. They were first cultivated in Ancient Egypt and were also popular in classical Greece and Rome. The Emperor Nero was so convinced they improved his singing and ate so many he was known as Porrophagus (leek eater). The Romans introduced them to Wales and the Welsh wore them when they defeated the Saxons in the 7th century. In those days “leac” was the generic term for any kind of onion or garlic (garleac).
Lobscouse, according to the Dictionary, is really a variety of Baltic dishes brought by seamen to Liverpool and to North Wales where it is the national dish. A street chant parodies the Charge of the Light Brigade:
“Half a leg, half a leg, half a leg of mutton,
Into the pan of scouse rolled the six onions.”
Scouse should be thick enough for a mouse to trot on and mushy enough to make a lobby butty.
Another cook book I would attempt to sneak in would be “Lobscouse and Spotted Dog” (Norton Books) by New Yorkers mother and daughter Ann and Lisa Grossman.
The book is the most brilliant concept for a cookbook that can be imagined. It is the gastronomic companion of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin sea novels and contains the recipes of the dishes they ate with such relish in the books. The Grossmans insist that lobscouse is a Viking dish, lapskaus (hodge podge), and point out that in Hamburg it is served with fried egg. Their authentic recipe
includes corned beef and smoked ham, juniper berries and various spices and sounds delicious.
Like all the best cookbooks, “Lobscouse” is a joy to read and a feast of knowledge. Each recipe which they have collected from cookbooks of the period is preceded by the excerpt from the novel in which it is mentioned. No other collection, I wager, includes recipes for Burgoo, Skillygalee, Drowned Baby, Figgy Dowdy,Solomongundy or Soused Hog's Face. You may omit roast rat, though the authors tried and enjoyed it.
For Welsh rarebit they recommend soaking the bread in porter (I use Guinness) and sprinkling mustard over the cheese, which should be melted by passing a red hot implement over it.
Another old favourite for purely nostalgic reasons (I hope a TV producer sees a copy) is broadcaster Allan Barham's hilarious book “Tales of the Old Waterloo” (Toby Books, P.O.Box 1274, Conwy, £4.99).
The Welsh Fawlty Towers, the Waterloo was a derelict Betws-y-Coed hotel which Barham's father took over in the Sixties. The stories are a delight and include such gems as the guard dog that kept guests awake with its barking, the girl in the kitbag, the day that Barham fell for the world's biggest pig and the water tank that went berserk. If I were casting it, Michael Crawford would get the Barham role since he has an attraction for disaster which amounts to genius, and Allan's father was John Cleese to a T.
The Waterloo, in Barham's own phrase, was “boozer with bedrooms”, which I remember with affection, though reading this book I am glad I was never tempted to stay there when the bar finally closed.
His latest book “My Years of Fun as a BBC Radio Reporter” is autobiography. He writes of his time when we were colleagues on BBC Wales, and as an instruction manual on how to be a broadcaster - and he was the best - it should be on the curriculum of every media studies course.
THE ULTIMATE EXAMPLE OF ONE THAT GOT AWAY...........................
“Uncle Henry Skidmore told me about coming to Texas. He said that he and Davy Crockett intended coming together from Tennessee and had made all arrangements to meet at a certain place for the start. When Crockett reached the place and did not find Skidmore there he concluded Skidmore had gone on without waiting so he struck out for Texas, expecting to overtake his friend. Skidmore arrived at the starting point the next day and found that Crockett had already gone, so he in turn struck out, expecting to overtake Davy.
Each was riding hard, each expecting to overtake the other, but Skidmore never caught up with Crockett until after they got to Texas. That winter Uncle Henry and some others went prospecting up Red River. There was a heavy snow fall. Provisions were running low and Uncle Henry said things looked serious, when one of the party killed a buffalo. They figured they were setting pretty nice, and went to work skinning the animal and cutting it up. They got the skin off and, as they turned the carcass on its back, the buffalo got away from them and made its escape. After letting one wonder how a skinned buffalo could escape, Uncle Henry would tell about it. The ground was frozen and covered with snow and ice and the carcass was near the river bank where the ground sloped. When they turned it over it got too far on the sloping bank and slid into the water and could not be recovered."
(extract from “Tales of Early Times in Lamas County” by Diane Skidmore Karas, a history of western characters)
CLIMATE CHANGE OF MIND
“What makes you sure that you’re right and all those scientists out there saying the opposite are wrong?”
‘I’m a geologist. We geologists have always recognised that climate changes over time. Where we differ from a lot of people pushing AGW is in our understanding of scale. They’re only interested in the last 150 years. Our time frame is 4,567 million years. So what they’re doing is the equivalent of trying to extrapolate the plot of Casablanca from one tiny bit of the love scene. And you can’t. It doesn’t work.’
What Heaven and Earth sets out to do is restore a sense of scientific perspective to a debate which has been hijacked by ‘politicians, environmental activists and opportunists’. It points out, for example, that polar ice has been present on earth for less than 20 per cent of geological time; that extinctions of life are normal; that climate changes are cyclical and random; that the CO2 in the atmosphere - to which human activity contributes the tiniest fraction - is only 0.001 per cent of the total CO2 held in the oceans, surface rocks, air, soils and life; that CO2 is not a pollutant but a plant food; that the earth’s warmer periods - such as when the Romans grew grapes and citrus trees as far north as Hadrian’s Wall - were times of wealth and plenty.
All this is scientific fact - which is more than you can say for any of the computer models turning out doomsday scenarios about inexorably rising temperatures, sinking islands and collapsing ice shelves. Plimer doesn’t trust them because they seem to have little if any basis in observed reality”
Professor Ian Plimer, Australian geologist whose new book “Heaven and Earth, Global warming the Missing Science” talking to James Delingpoil in the Spectator
How did I get to be 80
My friend Ken Ashton draws my attention to this latest nonsense. My mother would have described Denbighshire council as “Pots for Rags”. It is a phrase I find myself using almost hourly.
“ A raft of measures that could see teachers rifle through children’s lunch boxes and confiscate junk food in a bid to tackle childhood obesity have been passed.
School meal bosses in Denbighshire said a generation of children had been “let down” by being served unhealthy food like chips.
Now in a bid to tackle the issue councillors have passed a range of measures to encourage the uptake of healthy school dinners.
Other ideas approved for consideration include staggering lunch breaks, larger canteens, and keeping pupils in school at lunch time.
Yesterday the cabinet also voted to increase the price of school meals by around 50p a week to pay for healthier meals “.
Fish and Chips? Certainly. Fried fish is a traditional Hebrew dish sold cold on street corners in Victorian times. Not all Davidson's piety nor wit can discover when that happiest of marriages with the chip took place but it probably came to Britain via Ireland. I may be able to help there. Potato chips were a Renaissance dish invented in Florence, the home of gastronomy and the birthplace of the fork. When Marie de Medici of that sublime city married the Throne of France, she was so afraid of being poisoned she brought her chef Ranieri with her(the restaurant he founded in Rome still trades at the foot of the Spanish Steps. Try the Alpine strawberries in red wine). So called French cuisine is Florentine and, I have no doubt, included chips, erroneously claimed as "French fries".
Pikelets are light-weight muffins. The name is a Midlands corruption of the
Welsh bara pyglyd, a griddled batter of flour and milk. The fine old dish
“flummery” began as porridge but by Mrs Beeton's day had become a jellified custard with generous amounts of sherry. Flummery too is a corruption of Welsh, llymru.
The book even solves the mystery of the Welsh singing voice. Leeks. They were first cultivated in Ancient Egypt and were also popular in classical Greece and Rome. The Emperor Nero was so convinced they improved his singing and ate so many he was known as Porrophagus (leek eater). The Romans introduced them to Wales and the Welsh wore them when they defeated the Saxons in the 7th century. In those days “leac” was the generic term for any kind of onion or garlic (garleac).
Lobscouse, according to the Dictionary, is really a variety of Baltic dishes brought by seamen to Liverpool and to North Wales where it is the national dish. A street chant parodies the Charge of the Light Brigade:
“Half a leg, half a leg, half a leg of mutton,
Into the pan of scouse rolled the six onions.”
Scouse should be thick enough for a mouse to trot on and mushy enough to make a lobby butty.
Another cook book I would attempt to sneak in would be “Lobscouse and Spotted Dog” (Norton Books) by New Yorkers mother and daughter Ann and Lisa Grossman.
The book is the most brilliant concept for a cookbook that can be imagined. It is the gastronomic companion of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin sea novels and contains the recipes of the dishes they ate with such relish in the books. The Grossmans insist that lobscouse is a Viking dish, lapskaus (hodge podge), and point out that in Hamburg it is served with fried egg. Their authentic recipe
includes corned beef and smoked ham, juniper berries and various spices and sounds delicious.
Like all the best cookbooks, “Lobscouse” is a joy to read and a feast of knowledge. Each recipe which they have collected from cookbooks of the period is preceded by the excerpt from the novel in which it is mentioned. No other collection, I wager, includes recipes for Burgoo, Skillygalee, Drowned Baby, Figgy Dowdy,Solomongundy or Soused Hog's Face. You may omit roast rat, though the authors tried and enjoyed it.
For Welsh rarebit they recommend soaking the bread in porter (I use Guinness) and sprinkling mustard over the cheese, which should be melted by passing a red hot implement over it.
Another old favourite for purely nostalgic reasons (I hope a TV producer sees a copy) is broadcaster Allan Barham's hilarious book “Tales of the Old Waterloo” (Toby Books, P.O.Box 1274, Conwy, £4.99).
The Welsh Fawlty Towers, the Waterloo was a derelict Betws-y-Coed hotel which Barham's father took over in the Sixties. The stories are a delight and include such gems as the guard dog that kept guests awake with its barking, the girl in the kitbag, the day that Barham fell for the world's biggest pig and the water tank that went berserk. If I were casting it, Michael Crawford would get the Barham role since he has an attraction for disaster which amounts to genius, and Allan's father was John Cleese to a T.
The Waterloo, in Barham's own phrase, was “boozer with bedrooms”, which I remember with affection, though reading this book I am glad I was never tempted to stay there when the bar finally closed.
His latest book “My Years of Fun as a BBC Radio Reporter” is autobiography. He writes of his time when we were colleagues on BBC Wales, and as an instruction manual on how to be a broadcaster - and he was the best - it should be on the curriculum of every media studies course.
THE ULTIMATE EXAMPLE OF ONE THAT GOT AWAY...........................
“Uncle Henry Skidmore told me about coming to Texas. He said that he and Davy Crockett intended coming together from Tennessee and had made all arrangements to meet at a certain place for the start. When Crockett reached the place and did not find Skidmore there he concluded Skidmore had gone on without waiting so he struck out for Texas, expecting to overtake his friend. Skidmore arrived at the starting point the next day and found that Crockett had already gone, so he in turn struck out, expecting to overtake Davy.
Each was riding hard, each expecting to overtake the other, but Skidmore never caught up with Crockett until after they got to Texas. That winter Uncle Henry and some others went prospecting up Red River. There was a heavy snow fall. Provisions were running low and Uncle Henry said things looked serious, when one of the party killed a buffalo. They figured they were setting pretty nice, and went to work skinning the animal and cutting it up. They got the skin off and, as they turned the carcass on its back, the buffalo got away from them and made its escape. After letting one wonder how a skinned buffalo could escape, Uncle Henry would tell about it. The ground was frozen and covered with snow and ice and the carcass was near the river bank where the ground sloped. When they turned it over it got too far on the sloping bank and slid into the water and could not be recovered."
(extract from “Tales of Early Times in Lamas County” by Diane Skidmore Karas, a history of western characters)
CLIMATE CHANGE OF MIND
“What makes you sure that you’re right and all those scientists out there saying the opposite are wrong?”
‘I’m a geologist. We geologists have always recognised that climate changes over time. Where we differ from a lot of people pushing AGW is in our understanding of scale. They’re only interested in the last 150 years. Our time frame is 4,567 million years. So what they’re doing is the equivalent of trying to extrapolate the plot of Casablanca from one tiny bit of the love scene. And you can’t. It doesn’t work.’
What Heaven and Earth sets out to do is restore a sense of scientific perspective to a debate which has been hijacked by ‘politicians, environmental activists and opportunists’. It points out, for example, that polar ice has been present on earth for less than 20 per cent of geological time; that extinctions of life are normal; that climate changes are cyclical and random; that the CO2 in the atmosphere - to which human activity contributes the tiniest fraction - is only 0.001 per cent of the total CO2 held in the oceans, surface rocks, air, soils and life; that CO2 is not a pollutant but a plant food; that the earth’s warmer periods - such as when the Romans grew grapes and citrus trees as far north as Hadrian’s Wall - were times of wealth and plenty.
All this is scientific fact - which is more than you can say for any of the computer models turning out doomsday scenarios about inexorably rising temperatures, sinking islands and collapsing ice shelves. Plimer doesn’t trust them because they seem to have little if any basis in observed reality”
Professor Ian Plimer, Australian geologist whose new book “Heaven and Earth, Global warming the Missing Science” talking to James Delingpoil in the Spectator
How did I get to be 80
My friend Ken Ashton draws my attention to this latest nonsense. My mother would have described Denbighshire council as “Pots for Rags”. It is a phrase I find myself using almost hourly.
“ A raft of measures that could see teachers rifle through children’s lunch boxes and confiscate junk food in a bid to tackle childhood obesity have been passed.
School meal bosses in Denbighshire said a generation of children had been “let down” by being served unhealthy food like chips.
Now in a bid to tackle the issue councillors have passed a range of measures to encourage the uptake of healthy school dinners.
Other ideas approved for consideration include staggering lunch breaks, larger canteens, and keeping pupils in school at lunch time.
Yesterday the cabinet also voted to increase the price of school meals by around 50p a week to pay for healthier meals “.
Saturday, 11 July 2009
WHO DUNNIT
I used to have this fantasy where a spaceship landed just as I was stepping into a pub and disgorged dozens of little green men with a dozen arms apiece, carrying pencils and notebooks. Their leader explained they were doing market research. Their own planet had become uninhabitable and they were looking for somewhere else to live. Would I mind answering a few questions. Naturally I said I would be happy to oblige and when they said, “Where are you going now?” I said, “The Pub”.
“????????????” they said, pencils hovering uncertainly.
“It is a building where I stand in front of a long counter and buy beer and spirits,” I explain.
“???????????????????”
“Liquids that make one do silly things and sometimes vomit and is eventually poisonous.”
“What a terrible punishment.....................”
“No, I do it for pleasure.”
Little wonder that in my fantasy the spacemen scurried off to a more balanced planet.
Now I think Oscar Wilde was quite right. Nature does imitate art. There is evidence of an actual invasion from Outer Space. In making this ground breaking discovery I must give credit to the influence of Doctor Who, whom I discovered by accident on a Freeview Channel last month and have been obsessed with ever since. Made in Wales, it is the new Mabinogion. Though I do wish they would stop running everywhere.
Alarm bells rang when scientists announced they had evidence that the Soya sheep in the Outer Hebrides have been shrinking by 81g a year for the past 25 years. One scientist reassured us that we won't be seeing pygmy sheep being herded by Chihuahuas. We are not convinced, the good Doctor and I. Similar symptoms have been discerned in cod, sticklebacks, Marine Iguanas, North American squirrels and Blue Tits.
Worse, I have it on the authority of The Times that the long winged bushheaded cricket is flying further as its wings lengthen. In their innocence, the scientists claim this to be the result of global warming. A likely tale.
The Times in the same week carried the story of a tree stump in Co Limerick which is being worshipped because it is roughly shaped like the Virgin Mary. In vain the parish priest has said, “It's a tree. There is nothing there, it's just a tree. You cannot worship a tree.” Clearly he has not read Sir James Frazer's fascinating work “The Golden Bough”, an anthropological study of the days when tree worship had a very large fan club.
The Times took the opportunity to tell of earlier Alien interventions. There was the Welsh family who claimed to have seen the face of the Virgin on a tin of Marmite. Or the family in California who insisted their house smelled of roses after homemade salsa spattered their wall in resemblance of the Virgin. In Warwickshire this much travelled lady appeared on a pregnancy scan which the proud mother claimed meant the virgin was looking after her child.
She has a considerable market value. A ten year old toasted cheese sandwich on which her face appeared sold on E-bay for $20.000 and attracted 1.7 million hits.
Jesus has been seen in mildew, a rock surface, cement, cereal, a soya oil and a turtle. The jury is still out on claims that he also appears on the backside of a Los Angeles terrier.
In an impish moment on the Mirror, a Catholic picture editor and I launched a pilgrimage to a cow shed in Tintwistle, Lancashire. The Virgin Mary had appeared in full detail on a wall of the shed. We subbed out the explanation that a light flooding through a stained glass window from a demolished church which had been stored in the shed was throwing an image. I believe we encouraged 10,000 pilgrims to visit.
Doctor Who shares my belief that at the bottom of all these happenings is The Master, Anthony Gormless, who is spreading life forms which send whole populations insane. Its influence emanates from a pedestal in Trafalgar Square where humanoids take turns to stand, dressed in one case in a suit resembling human excreta to draw attention to the shortage of clean water, and where a man will play hip hop on a gramophone whilst making tea and an architect will mount a pink folding bike and pedal furiously to power a pink-lighted suit.
Most bizarre is a living sculpture where a near naked, middle-aged, 6 ft 2in tattooed skinhead will sit in a children's paddling pool, bathing in a gallon of fake blood mixed with real blood taken from his close friends and family.
On the beach at Crosby, near Liverpool, The Master's earlier madness from outer space, his Iron Men, have had a makeover. Supporters of the Crosby Housing Association checked the tide tablesand then took 40 different fashion outfits down to clothe the men, who rise from the sand where the waves break as the tide rises and falls.
Suits, gowns and - of course - beachwear were fitted, photographed and filmed before the statues were left naked again, apart from 40 blue balloons, by 7.30am.
Working in three shifts, seamstresses in the North of England are making a suit of tails for the giant Winged Spaceman with which the aliens announced their presence on the planet and which is now an object of worship.
The alien presence is most obvious in The Media. The impressive technology - HD, digital, 3D - that no one can afford proliferates and boggles the humanoid mind. The truth is they are toys for Alien Suits. In all the debate over them, no one has pointed out that the content these sophisticated machines deliver, which is the human contribution, is crap. This can be the only reason that the proliferation of networks is dominated by repeats. Alien scheduling ? Whatever programme you want to watch, it's on somewhere. And if you miss it one night, don't worry, it's on again the next night.
Our poor brains are not the equal of our New Masters.
The purpose of this control of humanoid minds is not yet clear, either to the Doctor or myself, but we are both convinced that the race has undergone dramatic change. The corruption in parliament, the police force, the BBC and now, we discover, the Civil Service, is so widespread we cannot believe it is accidental, nor can we blame it on the weather.
Every day brings fresh evidence of wrong doing. Even the News of the World is at it.
Parenthetically, if a Council induces a Chief Constable to take a job by offering a new car to his wife and a public school education for their children, where does that differ from bribery?
Five hundred years ago our greatest human brain counselled us “Neither a borrower nor a lender be”. We have corrupted Africa with our gifts and at home devices in the shape of small oblong plastic cards have been introduced to enable people who cannot afford it to borrow money. When Governments discovered we were deep in a world of debt, their answer was to spend more. Our army is ill-equipped. We take on new wars, when the obvious answer is to fight fewer. Our Banana Monarchy demands more money to keep up its five homes. Wiser heads would have solved the problem by having fewer homes. They solve it by asking for more money at the same time as they are giving their old houses to their kids and cousins at a bargain price. The Royals could, maybe, share the good fortune of parliament where members are allowed two homes and the tax payers, some of whom are being thrown out of their only home, pay for one of them.
As Doctor Watson wisely said, “These are deep waters, Holmes.”
“????????????” they said, pencils hovering uncertainly.
“It is a building where I stand in front of a long counter and buy beer and spirits,” I explain.
“???????????????????”
“Liquids that make one do silly things and sometimes vomit and is eventually poisonous.”
“What a terrible punishment.....................”
“No, I do it for pleasure.”
Little wonder that in my fantasy the spacemen scurried off to a more balanced planet.
Now I think Oscar Wilde was quite right. Nature does imitate art. There is evidence of an actual invasion from Outer Space. In making this ground breaking discovery I must give credit to the influence of Doctor Who, whom I discovered by accident on a Freeview Channel last month and have been obsessed with ever since. Made in Wales, it is the new Mabinogion. Though I do wish they would stop running everywhere.
Alarm bells rang when scientists announced they had evidence that the Soya sheep in the Outer Hebrides have been shrinking by 81g a year for the past 25 years. One scientist reassured us that we won't be seeing pygmy sheep being herded by Chihuahuas. We are not convinced, the good Doctor and I. Similar symptoms have been discerned in cod, sticklebacks, Marine Iguanas, North American squirrels and Blue Tits.
Worse, I have it on the authority of The Times that the long winged bushheaded cricket is flying further as its wings lengthen. In their innocence, the scientists claim this to be the result of global warming. A likely tale.
The Times in the same week carried the story of a tree stump in Co Limerick which is being worshipped because it is roughly shaped like the Virgin Mary. In vain the parish priest has said, “It's a tree. There is nothing there, it's just a tree. You cannot worship a tree.” Clearly he has not read Sir James Frazer's fascinating work “The Golden Bough”, an anthropological study of the days when tree worship had a very large fan club.
The Times took the opportunity to tell of earlier Alien interventions. There was the Welsh family who claimed to have seen the face of the Virgin on a tin of Marmite. Or the family in California who insisted their house smelled of roses after homemade salsa spattered their wall in resemblance of the Virgin. In Warwickshire this much travelled lady appeared on a pregnancy scan which the proud mother claimed meant the virgin was looking after her child.
She has a considerable market value. A ten year old toasted cheese sandwich on which her face appeared sold on E-bay for $20.000 and attracted 1.7 million hits.
Jesus has been seen in mildew, a rock surface, cement, cereal, a soya oil and a turtle. The jury is still out on claims that he also appears on the backside of a Los Angeles terrier.
In an impish moment on the Mirror, a Catholic picture editor and I launched a pilgrimage to a cow shed in Tintwistle, Lancashire. The Virgin Mary had appeared in full detail on a wall of the shed. We subbed out the explanation that a light flooding through a stained glass window from a demolished church which had been stored in the shed was throwing an image. I believe we encouraged 10,000 pilgrims to visit.
Doctor Who shares my belief that at the bottom of all these happenings is The Master, Anthony Gormless, who is spreading life forms which send whole populations insane. Its influence emanates from a pedestal in Trafalgar Square where humanoids take turns to stand, dressed in one case in a suit resembling human excreta to draw attention to the shortage of clean water, and where a man will play hip hop on a gramophone whilst making tea and an architect will mount a pink folding bike and pedal furiously to power a pink-lighted suit.
Most bizarre is a living sculpture where a near naked, middle-aged, 6 ft 2in tattooed skinhead will sit in a children's paddling pool, bathing in a gallon of fake blood mixed with real blood taken from his close friends and family.
On the beach at Crosby, near Liverpool, The Master's earlier madness from outer space, his Iron Men, have had a makeover. Supporters of the Crosby Housing Association checked the tide tablesand then took 40 different fashion outfits down to clothe the men, who rise from the sand where the waves break as the tide rises and falls.
Suits, gowns and - of course - beachwear were fitted, photographed and filmed before the statues were left naked again, apart from 40 blue balloons, by 7.30am.
Working in three shifts, seamstresses in the North of England are making a suit of tails for the giant Winged Spaceman with which the aliens announced their presence on the planet and which is now an object of worship.
The alien presence is most obvious in The Media. The impressive technology - HD, digital, 3D - that no one can afford proliferates and boggles the humanoid mind. The truth is they are toys for Alien Suits. In all the debate over them, no one has pointed out that the content these sophisticated machines deliver, which is the human contribution, is crap. This can be the only reason that the proliferation of networks is dominated by repeats. Alien scheduling ? Whatever programme you want to watch, it's on somewhere. And if you miss it one night, don't worry, it's on again the next night.
Our poor brains are not the equal of our New Masters.
The purpose of this control of humanoid minds is not yet clear, either to the Doctor or myself, but we are both convinced that the race has undergone dramatic change. The corruption in parliament, the police force, the BBC and now, we discover, the Civil Service, is so widespread we cannot believe it is accidental, nor can we blame it on the weather.
Every day brings fresh evidence of wrong doing. Even the News of the World is at it.
Parenthetically, if a Council induces a Chief Constable to take a job by offering a new car to his wife and a public school education for their children, where does that differ from bribery?
Five hundred years ago our greatest human brain counselled us “Neither a borrower nor a lender be”. We have corrupted Africa with our gifts and at home devices in the shape of small oblong plastic cards have been introduced to enable people who cannot afford it to borrow money. When Governments discovered we were deep in a world of debt, their answer was to spend more. Our army is ill-equipped. We take on new wars, when the obvious answer is to fight fewer. Our Banana Monarchy demands more money to keep up its five homes. Wiser heads would have solved the problem by having fewer homes. They solve it by asking for more money at the same time as they are giving their old houses to their kids and cousins at a bargain price. The Royals could, maybe, share the good fortune of parliament where members are allowed two homes and the tax payers, some of whom are being thrown out of their only home, pay for one of them.
As Doctor Watson wisely said, “These are deep waters, Holmes.”
Friday, 3 July 2009
CHIN,CHIN! CHINAMAN......................
The fact that China is about to take over the world worries me not a jot. Not because I will have shuffled off this mortal uncoiling before it happens. I have been besotted with Chinese culture for as long as I can remember.
I love Chinese food, which tastes good and has such lovely names. I have a small collection of Chinese objets d'art and a large collection of Chinese literature. I have just finished a Japanese garden with a koi pond and shrubs so costly I dare not publish them. I am slowly gathering to my bosom a Bonsai Forest. I admire and endeavour to understand Zen: I prefer it to Confucionism which is a sort of socialism with chopsticks.
The result, I thought, of reading in early youth three books: “The Importance of Living” by Lin Yutang, a collection of Chinese poetry made by Arthur Whalley and the works of Leonard Cottrell which brought a number of ancient cultures to life.
Dr Lin is the Eastern equivalent of the incomparable Western essayist Robert Lynd. He was a refugee from China, living in America, who wrote books about the ancient culture which was being crushed in his own country, something the present rulers had learned from the first Emperor, Cottrell's 'Tiger of Ch'in' who burned every book in the land.
“Living” is an anthology of ancient masters. Its chapters include “The Feast of Life”, “The Importance of Loafing”, “The Enjoyment of the Home”, “The Enjoyment of Living” and the “Enjoyment of Culture”, with sub-headings on lying in bed, growing old gracefully, wine and food, games and the inhumanity of Western dress.
It has a serious purpose. Dr Lin explains: “The Chinese philosopher is one who dreams with one eye open, who views life with love and irony, who mixes his cynicism with a kindly tolerance.”
I warm to Chinese poets more readily than I do the pallid 'greenery yallery' poets of the West. Frankly, if were sitting on a bus and Shelley or Browning or Keats got on, I would get off at the next stop.
Modern poets? R.S. Thomas, as disagreeable a man as any I have ever met, once said to me that modern poets were no more than gifted copy writers, about the only thing he said outside his magnificent poetry I didn't quarrel with. He was a man who could not express himself in prose.
I will never forgive Dylan Thomas for getting drunks such a bad name and I have spilt more ale down my shirt than he supped.
The Chinese took wine with infinitely more grace. Su Tung Po, the recluse of the Eastern hillside, Dr Lin's 'Gay Genius' (using both words in their original sense), is my favourite drunk of all time. A civil servant constantly in trouble with his bosses, he wrote a poem “Pine Wine in the Middle Mountain”:
“How much have I drunk today? Ah, I feel I can escape now from the fetters of mortality. I soar over running deer in the mountain peaks and join the leaping monkeys on the overhanging cliffs. Thence do I plunge into the billowing clouds of a vast ocean - Heaven in tumult.”
Those books were seminal, yet they were not the reason. Somewhere among the sad slab of prose about the death of Jackson was the proposition that if you want to know why Christ was betrayed you should look at the childhood of Judas.
In a shop last week I saw a tiny pottery model of a Mandarin fishing, and I remembered my mother's bowl. Pottery and filled with sand. A lake was represented by a mirror, by which just such a mandarin sat, perennially fishing. There was a porcelain pagoda, bushes made of loofah, a wooden bridge over the mirror and a tea house with tiny geishas. I thought it was the most marvellous object in the world. In those days you could buy the components from Woolies and they were all the rage on our council estate. At No 5 the Chinese micro world was in a constant state of flux as lake, geisha, mandarin and tea house suffered endless regeneration at my hands.
On that little bowl, which must have cost all of half a crown, I have built my intellectual life. I wonder what Tao Te Ching would make of that.
DAMN CLEVER PEOPLE THESE CHINESE>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Height-wise, there is not a lot of my Chinese friend Josie Fung. She could pole vault with a chopstick. But, as Lloyd George pointed out, we measure people from the neck up.
On that basis, Josie was a giant. She ran three restaurants, lectured on oriental cuisine, and, as liaison officer for a Sixth Form college, she toured China and Hong Kong recruiting oriental students. Yet she still found time to commute between her sister in Hong Kong and her daughter at university in the States. And went into business as a champagne importer. A Chinese champagne importer, would you believe?
I have long complained that Chinese food, which I love, kills the taste of most wines known to man. Purely academic to on-the-wagon me but selflessness is my watchword.
I did not expect my little Chinese cracker to come up with an answer to bring universal pleasure to punters both on and off the wagon. Non-alcoholic Chinese champagne, which not only lifts the heart (its prime ingredient is ginseng) but also fills the mouth with springtime. Stand on me. If they could bottle a bouquet of your favourite flowers, it would taste like this delicious brew.
Ginseng shares with the grape a very impressive power of spirit elevation. It would make the Merry Widow even merrier.
For some inscrutable oriental reason, this ambrosia is called Happi Camper. A wine of such quality deserves poetry. Ambrosia? Printemps, perhaps? Merry Widow, even?
Josie, as I say, is not tall - around five feet in fact, four feet, nine inches of which is heart. On her last visit to the States she saw a statuette of the Chinese god of Wealth and Health, who, with the dwarf Boboli in the eponymous Gardens in Florence, is a rare representation in art of a spinnaker belly bigger than mine. This particular statue is about a foot high, and heavy. So I was greatly touched that she lugged it across the Atlantic to the UK, where she presented it to me. It stands at the rim of my Koi pool, a constant reminder of a happy friendship.
THE UNKINDEST CUTTING...................
In 1972, the Sunday Express carried a story about a wedding that went wrong. The vicar had objected when a bagpiper marched down the aisle playing Amazing Grace, drowning the organist who was playing the theme music from Dr Zhivago, at the bride’s request. The organist responded by playing louder. It was not this the vicar objected to but that one of the guests was filming the bagpiper.
The cutting continues: “The bride’s father - a former paratrooper - intervened to say ‘if the Queen can have her wedding filmed, so can my daughter. The bagpiper is a relative. This do cost me a tenner and I have thrown it away.’ So saying, he challenged the vicar to a fight.”
It was from the Daily Telegraph that I culled this tale of a young soldier obviously destined for High Command.
“Henry ......, aged 17, set out a week ago from his home near Rhayader (Powys) taking the first train ride of his life to the Army Centre at Sutton Coldfield near Birmingham.
“He arrived at Birmingham and then got lost. On Saturday, after four police forces had been alerted, he was found walking along a road near Wimbourne in Staffordshire. He told a policeman he was trying to find the Army Centre.
“Henry’s mother said: ‘He could not find the right train from Birmingham. After a while he gave up and decided to get back home and start all over again.'
“But it took him three days to get out of Birmingham. Even when he was found, Henry was walking in the wrong direction.
“Accompanied by relatives he will report to the Centre today. He is hoping to start a career in the Army’s administration service.”
Another newspaper reported:
“Zimbabwe’s Minister of Finance Bernard Chidzero upset a number of Harare luminaries when he failed to turn up after agreeing to be the guest of honour at a business luncheon. When the organiser phoned his office for an explanation the Minister’s secretary told her: ‘He was not hungry.’”
And finally in the paper last week:
“Swansea artist Sue Williams has been given a lottery grant to study women's bottoms.”
It reminded me of the column I wrote in 1984 mocking the Welsh Arts Council Sculpture committee attending a luncheon dished up on a service created by sculptor Beryl Cheame from mouldings of her body. “My breasts did for soup bowls and my tummy for plates,” she said. “Later I added a casserole made from a cast of my buttocks.............................”
The ultimate anal retention?
I love Chinese food, which tastes good and has such lovely names. I have a small collection of Chinese objets d'art and a large collection of Chinese literature. I have just finished a Japanese garden with a koi pond and shrubs so costly I dare not publish them. I am slowly gathering to my bosom a Bonsai Forest. I admire and endeavour to understand Zen: I prefer it to Confucionism which is a sort of socialism with chopsticks.
The result, I thought, of reading in early youth three books: “The Importance of Living” by Lin Yutang, a collection of Chinese poetry made by Arthur Whalley and the works of Leonard Cottrell which brought a number of ancient cultures to life.
Dr Lin is the Eastern equivalent of the incomparable Western essayist Robert Lynd. He was a refugee from China, living in America, who wrote books about the ancient culture which was being crushed in his own country, something the present rulers had learned from the first Emperor, Cottrell's 'Tiger of Ch'in' who burned every book in the land.
“Living” is an anthology of ancient masters. Its chapters include “The Feast of Life”, “The Importance of Loafing”, “The Enjoyment of the Home”, “The Enjoyment of Living” and the “Enjoyment of Culture”, with sub-headings on lying in bed, growing old gracefully, wine and food, games and the inhumanity of Western dress.
It has a serious purpose. Dr Lin explains: “The Chinese philosopher is one who dreams with one eye open, who views life with love and irony, who mixes his cynicism with a kindly tolerance.”
I warm to Chinese poets more readily than I do the pallid 'greenery yallery' poets of the West. Frankly, if were sitting on a bus and Shelley or Browning or Keats got on, I would get off at the next stop.
Modern poets? R.S. Thomas, as disagreeable a man as any I have ever met, once said to me that modern poets were no more than gifted copy writers, about the only thing he said outside his magnificent poetry I didn't quarrel with. He was a man who could not express himself in prose.
I will never forgive Dylan Thomas for getting drunks such a bad name and I have spilt more ale down my shirt than he supped.
The Chinese took wine with infinitely more grace. Su Tung Po, the recluse of the Eastern hillside, Dr Lin's 'Gay Genius' (using both words in their original sense), is my favourite drunk of all time. A civil servant constantly in trouble with his bosses, he wrote a poem “Pine Wine in the Middle Mountain”:
“How much have I drunk today? Ah, I feel I can escape now from the fetters of mortality. I soar over running deer in the mountain peaks and join the leaping monkeys on the overhanging cliffs. Thence do I plunge into the billowing clouds of a vast ocean - Heaven in tumult.”
Those books were seminal, yet they were not the reason. Somewhere among the sad slab of prose about the death of Jackson was the proposition that if you want to know why Christ was betrayed you should look at the childhood of Judas.
In a shop last week I saw a tiny pottery model of a Mandarin fishing, and I remembered my mother's bowl. Pottery and filled with sand. A lake was represented by a mirror, by which just such a mandarin sat, perennially fishing. There was a porcelain pagoda, bushes made of loofah, a wooden bridge over the mirror and a tea house with tiny geishas. I thought it was the most marvellous object in the world. In those days you could buy the components from Woolies and they were all the rage on our council estate. At No 5 the Chinese micro world was in a constant state of flux as lake, geisha, mandarin and tea house suffered endless regeneration at my hands.
On that little bowl, which must have cost all of half a crown, I have built my intellectual life. I wonder what Tao Te Ching would make of that.
DAMN CLEVER PEOPLE THESE CHINESE>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Height-wise, there is not a lot of my Chinese friend Josie Fung. She could pole vault with a chopstick. But, as Lloyd George pointed out, we measure people from the neck up.
On that basis, Josie was a giant. She ran three restaurants, lectured on oriental cuisine, and, as liaison officer for a Sixth Form college, she toured China and Hong Kong recruiting oriental students. Yet she still found time to commute between her sister in Hong Kong and her daughter at university in the States. And went into business as a champagne importer. A Chinese champagne importer, would you believe?
I have long complained that Chinese food, which I love, kills the taste of most wines known to man. Purely academic to on-the-wagon me but selflessness is my watchword.
I did not expect my little Chinese cracker to come up with an answer to bring universal pleasure to punters both on and off the wagon. Non-alcoholic Chinese champagne, which not only lifts the heart (its prime ingredient is ginseng) but also fills the mouth with springtime. Stand on me. If they could bottle a bouquet of your favourite flowers, it would taste like this delicious brew.
Ginseng shares with the grape a very impressive power of spirit elevation. It would make the Merry Widow even merrier.
For some inscrutable oriental reason, this ambrosia is called Happi Camper. A wine of such quality deserves poetry. Ambrosia? Printemps, perhaps? Merry Widow, even?
Josie, as I say, is not tall - around five feet in fact, four feet, nine inches of which is heart. On her last visit to the States she saw a statuette of the Chinese god of Wealth and Health, who, with the dwarf Boboli in the eponymous Gardens in Florence, is a rare representation in art of a spinnaker belly bigger than mine. This particular statue is about a foot high, and heavy. So I was greatly touched that she lugged it across the Atlantic to the UK, where she presented it to me. It stands at the rim of my Koi pool, a constant reminder of a happy friendship.
THE UNKINDEST CUTTING...................
In 1972, the Sunday Express carried a story about a wedding that went wrong. The vicar had objected when a bagpiper marched down the aisle playing Amazing Grace, drowning the organist who was playing the theme music from Dr Zhivago, at the bride’s request. The organist responded by playing louder. It was not this the vicar objected to but that one of the guests was filming the bagpiper.
The cutting continues: “The bride’s father - a former paratrooper - intervened to say ‘if the Queen can have her wedding filmed, so can my daughter. The bagpiper is a relative. This do cost me a tenner and I have thrown it away.’ So saying, he challenged the vicar to a fight.”
It was from the Daily Telegraph that I culled this tale of a young soldier obviously destined for High Command.
“Henry ......, aged 17, set out a week ago from his home near Rhayader (Powys) taking the first train ride of his life to the Army Centre at Sutton Coldfield near Birmingham.
“He arrived at Birmingham and then got lost. On Saturday, after four police forces had been alerted, he was found walking along a road near Wimbourne in Staffordshire. He told a policeman he was trying to find the Army Centre.
“Henry’s mother said: ‘He could not find the right train from Birmingham. After a while he gave up and decided to get back home and start all over again.'
“But it took him three days to get out of Birmingham. Even when he was found, Henry was walking in the wrong direction.
“Accompanied by relatives he will report to the Centre today. He is hoping to start a career in the Army’s administration service.”
Another newspaper reported:
“Zimbabwe’s Minister of Finance Bernard Chidzero upset a number of Harare luminaries when he failed to turn up after agreeing to be the guest of honour at a business luncheon. When the organiser phoned his office for an explanation the Minister’s secretary told her: ‘He was not hungry.’”
And finally in the paper last week:
“Swansea artist Sue Williams has been given a lottery grant to study women's bottoms.”
It reminded me of the column I wrote in 1984 mocking the Welsh Arts Council Sculpture committee attending a luncheon dished up on a service created by sculptor Beryl Cheame from mouldings of her body. “My breasts did for soup bowls and my tummy for plates,” she said. “Later I added a casserole made from a cast of my buttocks.............................”
The ultimate anal retention?
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