CUCK WHO ?

There is not a lot to be said for death but at least it means I won't have to suffer another year of general electioneering. Pick your four favourite MPs? I couldn't pick four I would trust to take Taz, my long dog, for a walk. I don't just mean contemporary MPs. I mean since politicking started in the 17th century.

To digress: as a fully paid up Stoic, I have no fear of death because I won't know it has happened. Dying is a different matter and I am not looking forward to that. I just hope there is time for a witticism. There will never be a time when I have a more attentive audience. I think of the man who was dying surrounded by his family.

“Has he gone yet?” whispered one daughter.

“Feel his feet,” said another. “Nobody ever died with warm feet.”

At which point the dying man uttered his last whisper. “What about Joan of Arc?” he asked, and died with enormous satisfaction.

It is always of great value to have a nodding acquaintance with the past. Particularly useful as a CV for politicians. It would be difficult to argue against the execution of that poisonous dwarf King Charles One, which might with profit have been repeated on the priapic Charles Two, who wanted to sell us to the French. Forby that, the Cromwell parliament was a mistake. Very New Labour, banning plum pudding and Christmas.

Later on, giving America away was another error. They obviously long to have a king of their very own and I don't suppose black Americans and the Indian tribes welcomed an independent America. The French Revolution was a mess. Storming the Bastille was pure spin. There were only nine people in it at the time and the French couldn't wait to put a Bourbon back on the throne. The Russian Revolution was, perhaps, the greatest mistake. Most of the changes it sought to bring were already happening under the Czar, and the German High Command had to rush Lenin to Moscow in a special train or there would not have been any point in him making the journey. In the event, the peasants didn't lose the Czar: they just got Czars of a different dynasty. Josef Stalin versus Boris Godunov? No contest.

It is in the last two centuries that we see parliament at its very worst. The Great War, which began in 1914 and ended in 1945, dealt a death blow to Western Civilisation. Versailles has rightly been called the Peace that Passeth all Understanding. The present situation in the Middle East, which may yet turn into World War Three, was created by our betrayal of the Arabs. We promised them a homeland while at the same time signing the Sykes-Picot Agreement which carved up the Ottoman Empire between us and the French. The Balfour Declaration, which gave away Palestine (which we didn't own), has hardly brought harmony. The seeds of Nazism would never have flourished had we not insisted on reparations from Germany so excessive that the Weimar Republic collapsed and with it cultured Germany.

The postwar Labour Party had no sense of timing. They created the Welfare State at a time when Britain was bankrupt and fed the infant monster bureaucracy which has now gobbled us up.

A curse on both houses for their bellicosity. The ten-week war in Kosovo cost $100 million a day. The first Gulf War was even more expensive. It came in at $102 billion.

We were denied any advantage by refusing to join the Common Market at a time when we might have influenced it, at the same time gleefully handing over British proprietary rights. The Navy, humbled in 2007 when those 15 sailors surrendered to the Iranians and its subsequent failure to fight the rabble of Somali pirates, will soon be operating aircraft carriers devoid of aircraft. The diplomatic fall-out from the colonial adventure in Iraq will linger for generations. Nothing leaves a greater blot on our record that the genocide we launched in the partition of India.

I had high hopes of the Coalition, because I thought one party would keep an eye on the other. Some hopes. We send the prime of our youth to fight an unwinnable war in Afghanistan on behalf of a corrupt government and encourage them by promising that when the war is over they will have the holiday of their life - for the rest of their lives. One might set this threat of redundancy to music. Perhaps the World War One favourite which encouraged an earlier flowering of youth to fade: “We don't want to lose you but we think you ought to go.”

Meanwhile we are itching to help the rebels in the north Africa to usurp the leaders we have been propping up for years. Has no one noticed that fundamentalism already has Tunisia in its grip?

Most shaming of all. We cannot celebrate Trafalgar Day. It would upset
the French.

Efforts from the Establishment to destroy the English language proceed apace. Two news items from reader Ken Ashton:

“The coroner in charge of the 7/7 inquests criticised emergency services bosses today for using too much jargon.
Lady Justice Hallett said some terms were so cumbersome and complex that one 999 worker might not know what a counterpart did when arriving at an emergency scene. Lady Justice Hallett let fly at Gary Reason, assistant commissioner of London Fire Brigade. She spoke out as mention was made of "a conference demountable unit from a management centre" - which is a portable incident room. Ambulances took an hour to get to Tavistock Square because the officer in the control room couldn't reach the top of the whiteboard detailing operations.”


A 34 per cent turnout is a 'resounding success', says BBC Wales of the Celtic Referendum...Turnout, below 30% in some areas, was described by First Minister Carwyn Jones as "not brilliant, but then not apocalyptic, which some people predicted."
Deputy First Minister and Plaid Cymru leader Ieuan Wyn Jones said: "The rest of the world can now sit up and take notice of the fact that our small nation, here on the western edge of the continent of Europe, has demonstrated pride in who we are, and what we all stand for." (Well, almost three-quarters of the population didn't.)

AND IN THE NEST
studies variously showed between 5 and 30 percent of American and British babies to have been adulterously conceived. Again, the proportion of the tested couples of whom at least the wife had practiced adultery must have been higher for the same ... reasons as in Dr. X's study."

Author: Jared Diamond
Title: The Third Chimpanzee
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Date: Copyright 1992 by Jared Diamond
Pages: 85-86



On the whole I wonder if I am doing the right thing in keeping Alzheimer's at bay? My doctor has already told me not to worry because I won't know I have got it. No use. I will not be deterred. I have others to consider.

'tis a far, far nobler thing that I do now than I have ever done before - but I Must Be Firm. My duty, however unpleasant, is clear. I will firmly tread the path of the martyr. Recent research has shown that 38 per cent of us will escape Alzheimer's if we drink a glass of wine a day.
I MUST GIVE UP TEETOTALISM.

Dr Jekyll but what happened to make Hyde hide?

Here they come, struck by a coup de foudre, hand in hand, dancing down the years, benignity and senility.

It's a transformation. I don't get mad any more. Not even when: "I- have- just- lost- three- quarters- of- the- mss- of- a - book - I am writing - I- bought - three-data- recovery- services- none- of- which worked -so- I tried- to- get- back- a system- I- used- to- have- on- my- computer- which- retained- all- my- output- but I- have- been- on- the- phone- this morning -to- every- known- bloody- continent - interrupted-by-my-wife-seeking-my-opinion-on-the-fourth-new-outfit-she-has-bought-this-week-(which-is-puzzling-because-whenever-I-ask-about-an-outfit-which-is-new-to-me-it-is-always something-she-bought-years-ago)- and- until- the- last-call-l could-not- find- anyone- among-the-thousands-of-staff-in- the- bt-shops-worldwide- who-knew-what-I-was-talking-about-an d-when I tried-as-they-suggested-to-email- them-I-got-a-failed-message-which-said-their-email-box- was-full-so-they-weren't-taking-any-more-messages!!!!”

Don't feel envy any more; no twitches of resentment, not even distaste.
Dammit, I have even begun to like Anne Robinson. Only met her briefly forty years ago when the insecurity which is at her core was still bubbling on the surface. Didn't like her, which was odd because I was champagne chums with one of her ex-hubbies, Charlie Wilson, who once when he edited The Times called over to a sub: “C'm here, fingers.” When the sub asked why he called him fingers he said, “Because that is what you are holding on to your job by.”

I met him when he was news editing The Daily Mail and I went in to do a casual shift, and he said: “We must be scraping the bottom of the bucket.” And I said: “Well, you know how it is with buckets. All the shit floats to the top.”

When I really went off Ms Robinson was when she became quiz mistress on “The Weakest Link” and adopted this faux-dominatrix role, coupled with the weakest wink in show business. Also I couldn't understand how every time she was photographed she got younger.

What changed my mind? It was her transformation on “My Life in Books”, which is high on my list of favourite programmes. You may have noticed that the BBC has discovered literature and the hills are alive with the sound of readers. Not the bogus Notting Hill intellectuals who put you off reading by their carefully assumed, just for the broadcast, views. The unlikeable in full pursuit of the unreadable.

Ms R clearly loves books and it shows. She picks guests who share her love and skilfully gets from them trenchant comment. She has found from somewhere an attractive smile and a look that says she cares. The guests blossom as they realise this, and their choice of favourite books is commendable: ”Wind in the Willows”, “Alice in Wonderland”, “Great Expectations“, “Nicholas Nickleby”, as well as books unknown which always sound worth reading.

I do not always agree with them, though. I even, Buddha Forgive Me, disagreed with the saintly P.D. James. She said - and I was sad to hear that Ms R agreed with her - that she liked books by their touch and their smell. Dammit, all that's what I used to like about women. Books I read as portals to another world.

They were very rude about E-books. I cannot think why. I have two which means that I can carry 7,000 books in my pocket. In the old days I knew chaps who wore two raincoats for extra book portage.

At which point I will take advantage of the liberty of senility to digress.
Two warriors whom I admire are among the signatories to a letter warning that the dismantling of the Harrier fleet and the Ark Royal will rob us of the ability to defend ourselves from the Wahabi-driven Middle East which is emerging like Ovid's dragon's teeth. Not worried about the Chinese. They dominate cyber space and will beat anyone by hacking into their nerve centres. As usual, a weak response from a defence secretary without a jot of the letter writer's experience of battle. “We have no money,” he bleated.

I was in Lewis's this week hovering over a demonstration of Ipads, longing to know how they work but afraid to touch them. As I hovered, a selection of sundry teenagers, even ten-and-below-agers, rushed up, waved their hands and all sorts of things began to happen. Greatly daring, I asked one young man in the throes of virulent acne whether since I had an E-book I needed to get an Ipad. “Not really,” he said. “I have an Ipad and a computer and a Kindle. The trouble with the Ipad is that the batteries need recharging every eight hours.”

Not only did he save me £400: he could save the country countless millions. What is this fuss over library closures>? Close them all. The argument in their favour is outdated. Certainly I was educated in them and the best moment in my young life was when I qualified for an adult ticket and could borrow four books at a time. Today you can download around two million books free of charge and buy new ones online at a greatly reduced price. Second-hand paperbacks are available for the price of an ice cream or a lollipop. The few people who haven't got assorted computers could be given them free. Couple that saving with the money you would save by closing down the universities and replacing them with an Open University network and we would be literally quids in. Think of it. Streets free of feral student mobs, parents no longer having to scrimp and save to give their children the right to drop out in their second expensive year.

“Ah Bliss! Ah Toot, Toot!” to echo the magnificent Mr Toad.

SURLY BATH TIME

To the ancient among those present, the cup of humiliation comes bucket size and this week I drained it to its bitter dregs.

I gave up writing comic fiction - as I mentioned - because life, as Oscar Wilde observed, imitates art. That is not entirely true. I no longer write comic happenings: I live them.

Last Wednesday morning I got stuck in the bath and my wife summoned the fire brigade. Through that brief sentence flows a river of tears. The fire brigade arrived on a fire engine but, thank God, not ringing the bell. A very comely neighbour, alarmed by the sight of a fire engine, rang to ask if she could help. My wife, who hates to see me enjoying myself, said no.

For reasons I will rehearse later, I am nervous about summoning fire brigades. For these gentlemen I have nothing but praise. Although I could see the effort it cost them, they did not laugh once. Unlike my wife.

No doubt the account of their rescue will be marked with a star in the fire station occurrence book and generations of firemen yet unborn will let the welkin ring with their laughter. The two firemen who answered the call were made of sterner stuff. They weighed up the job with becoming gravity - and silently summoned a third. I still puzzle why they said, “No use asking Larry. He's too tall.”

I explained I had entered the bath to shower, stepped on the soap, shot in the air and was now wedged like an egg in a cup. A spoon being out of a question, I feared their thoughts were running towards corks in bottles. I did them a disservice. In a trice I was entirely surrounded by firemen. Willing hands seized me round body parts previously fire brigade free. I rose like a Botticelli Venus from the waves, adopting much the same discreet posture with the bath an unconvincing shell at my feet. We parted with mutual expressions of goodwill. They said to call them any time and in the face of such kindness it seemed churlish to say I hoped not.

It was in Chester that I summoned a fire crew for the first time. I had a wardrobe-sized cupboard in which to keep my drinks that lit up when you opened the door - an occurrence so frequent that a lady in a flat across the river thought I was semaphoring her. I remember it was the next morning by the time I had corrected her.

On the day of the fire brigade I had opened the cupboard and found it smoking. My son, an imaginative child, immediately leapt to the phone and before I could stop him had summoned the brigade. I grabbed the phone and begged them not to arrive clanging their fire bell but they seemed quite hurt. They said they had to ring their bell: regulations, apparently. They may have added it was more than their job was worth not to but by this time my grip on reality was loosening and I replaced the phone with a nervous whinny. When the brigade arrived it was like a visitation from Westminster cathedral. So loud was the bell, so enthusiastic the fireman's tolling, that people a mile away rushed to the windows to see what was going on.

I told the leading firemen I thought it was a fuse in the door lock which triggered the light. He looked at me in a marked manner and said, “Please don't tell us how to do our job”, and pushed me brusquely aside.

They did their job by climbing into the eaves, inadvertently putting a foot through the ceiling in the process, and entered the drinks cupboard from above, wielding axes so enthusiastically that several bottles of spirits were damaged beyond repair. After an interval the chief fireman approached me, still glaring in an enhanced marked manner. “It was only a fuse in the switch mechanism,” he said. “An unnecessary call out and by rights I should be charging you for it.”

Some years later on Anglesey, my mother had come to spend Christmas with us. My mother held the course and distance record for immovability. Settled into a fireside armchair, she only got up to go to bed or to the lavatory. She didn't even move from her chair when the chimney caught fire. She sat like Patience on a Monument when the fire brigade arrived and they had virtually to climb over her to get at the blaze. She neither stirred nor spoke until the blaze was quelled, when she said: “Have you been offered something to drink?”

I have to tell you that a bottle of brandy goes nowhere among eight Anglesey firemen. I was relieved when, a little unsteadily, they left. Only for the chief firemen to return and say how he was sorry to bother me but the driver was upset because he was the only one who hadn't had a drink. Clearly the rest of the team believed in solidarity. They all came back with him and another bottle of Remy Martin bit the dust in their throats.

Mind you, our Chester postman was much worse. I joined a record club that sent out a Shakespeare play on a long player every month. It proved quite beyond the postman, who folded it double to get it through the letter box. I rang to complain and the girl on the other end said: “Are you sure it's unplayable?” I said not if you had a crescent-shaped turntable and didn't mind Lady Macbeth going mad in Act One. The claim was allowed and a man arrived with a cheque and a warning: “If you accept this cheque you must never play the record.”

HEADLINES

Liverpool Echo...
Swinger businesswoman who posed as stripagram accuses crossing-dressing Birkenhead man of rape

Daily Mail
Jewish football team get the red card for fielding players from other religions

where are gilbert and sullivan when you want them

I gave up writing satirical novels when no sooner had I thought of an absurdity than real life capped it with ease. I wrote of uniformed bobbies invading a mutinous Welsh island and within months the metropolitan police invaded an island in the Caribbean.
Since childhood I have had a sense that Britain as a society was collapsing round my ears. The maps in my school days were predominantly red to denote our empire. Nowadays, the red signifies embarrassment. Africa is in a state of collapse, Pakistan was apparently created to give the natives on the Indian sub-continent a good reason for killing each other. Marriage was discouraged by our government, discipline was a punishable offence, parent power spluttered and died. Ours is the century of universal education? In a pig's ear. Our universities are open to all? Rather like student demonstrations.

I am not clear why they are demonstrating. If they weren't, the mass unemployed would take to the streets in violent action. There was no time when the state could afford free education - and is paying for it so bad? Top weight it will cost a student £27,000 which he can borrow on no interest terms. A student will not be called upon to pay it back until he is earning £21,000 a year. Not a bad investment when after 14 months you are in profit.

Why when we have such excellent classes on the Open University do we need buildings of learning anyway? It is a medieval concept that went out with the Victorian penny. At least two thirds of degree courses were created as job opportunities for lecturers.

It looks as though we are going to lose our free libraries. Is that such a bad thing? When I was young I was educated by library ticket. Go into any library now and you will find little worth reading. Librarians combed their shelves for any book that was remotely literary and sold it. On the internet there are several sites offering a million books free. The public libraries are internet cafes that don't sell coffee.

Although we know it is wrong, we bow down to Europe and give murderers, thieves, paedophiles and fraudsters the right to vote and determine the society which they have abused. Two of my friends are furious. They have never had the vote in their adult lives. Peers of the Realm are barred.

Our prime minister's visits to America look more and more like a summons to the headmaster's study. Our Houses of Parliament have become houses of ill repute. When I was a boy, peace and fairness in our avenue was maintained by an unofficial coalition of fathers. Later on, irresponsible unions ran the country and ruined our industry.

The Speaker's chattel is photographed dressed only in a bed sheet; the new editor of The Lady, inevitably one of the ubiquitous Johnsons, feels obliged to announce to her genteel readership that her teenage daughter has shaved her pubic hair. There was a time when I felt the kingdom was a tragedy: I did not know it would become a farce.

I expect the reason the oak tree is joining the elm in oblivion is that it no longer wishes to symbolise the heap of rubbish that was once a country worth loving, even dying for. I can hardly wait to join them.

Which reminds me - my late chum Stanley Blenkinsop, once news editor of the Daily Express and the last man I knew to wear a monocle, has ordered his ashes to be scattered between the Express building and Yates's Wine Lodge.

Our lethal police force wouldn't have anyone saying, as foreigners were wont to say, “I think your policemen are wonderful”. Indeed they are Dixons more often in the dock than on the green. I have always thought there was something vaguely comic about the Peelers' hats. Pointed for the other ranks; and for the officers, peaked caps, dripping with silver lace like seagoing chauffeurs. Puzzling how our lethal police are so dexterous with automatic rifles, yet after five years of investigating they are still having difficulty with phones. They are quick to advise on the law: crime-ridden householders have been warned by them not to put wire over shed windows. The helpful police point out a burglar might injure himself breaking the windows AND WOULD SUE.

Understandable under the circumstances that a number of chief constables have put their heads together to write a 21-page manual on how to ride a bike, which also includes handy hints on how to eat lemon curd to boost energy levels, avoid swarming insects and cure chapped lips and sore bottoms.

After explaining the use of hand signals, they advise riders to judge the time each signal should last by saying “one elephants, two elephants, three elephants”, as was done in the 1981 film “Gregory's Girl”. Were seven pages necessary to explain how to get off a cycle - bring your cycle to a halt before getting off, when cycling downhill do not put your feet down to slow down?- But how wise it was to warn them not to pursue suspects until they passed the advanced cycling course. And surely three pages on what to eat whilst cycling is excessive?

But you can see why I have given up writing satirical fiction.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive but to be young in World War 2 was very heaven. Living like Mr Mole in underground air raid shelters, bombed every night like little Ernest Hemingways. Best of all, a Huckleberry Finn life of no school, which meant I could devote more time to books.

By the time I was four I had learned to read and could see no other point in education. At 82, I am still reading and it is the nearest I have ever come to spirited activity. I read as a schoolboy, as a printer's devil, as a soldier, in an army prison, through half a century as a reporter and a broadcaster. I read my way through two marriages, richer and poorer, and through cancer. I have sold books, bought books, stolen books, been a book critic and written twenty-seven of my own. I grew a Jimmy Edwards moustache to thank him for introducing me to Mr Jorrocks and his noble sentiment: “Pick me up, tie me to my chair and fill up my glass.”

Like Jorrocks, I took up marathon wine drinking. It didn't matter that my stories ended up wrapping fish and chips. It gave me something to read as I ate my suppers. When my father banished books from the dining room, I read the labels on sauce bottles. Broadcasting was to give a third dimension to the printed word.

Ah, the printed word! When the bubonic plague knocked the bottom out of his business making mirrors for pilgrims, Gutenberg invented the book by turning a borrowed wine press into a printing flatbed. Learning that moveable type was invented by a Chinese blacksmith sent me scurrying to Su Tung-po, the bibulous poet of the 11th century.

My family clubbed together to buy me an E Book-reader for my eightieth birthday and I was able to carry a library in my pocket. It was the first major change in the history of book-making and I couldn't wait to be part of it.

Now I am part of the automatic text-to-speak computer world. My autobiography “Forgive Us Our Press Passes” is winging out of cyberspace, never to yellow or disappear. I'm among the first to latch onto high tech communication, even though I started the job hardly able to change my own typewriter ribbons. I am a journalist from the hot metal Golden Age. Speaking with a new breed of Evian-drinking, brown-bagging desk-huggers who feel nothing farther than a screen away is a waste of time.

Oh brave new world that has such wonders in it.


For the first time in its long history this column welcomes a guest adornment. Neil Marr, co-founder of Bewrite Books who has put my book in E-land writes:

BRAND NEW LITERARY GENRE ... WITH WHISKERS ON IT!
Neil Marr 
Journalists have been writing for the chap on the bus to work and the lord who pours over the carefully ironed pages of The Times in his study ever since Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenburger (Gutenberg to thee and me) was just a messy thing in his pram and then a struggling young feller with a bright idea, knocking an old wine press into a primitive, hand-cranked printing engine, away from prying eyes in his cellar ... the written word’s first best-cellar?
I opened BeWrite Books ten years ago as a publishing venture. It’s been growing stronger ever since, with 2010 as a kind of watershed year for us. We always have at least 120 exclusive titles in our catalogue. Part of the reason it’s working is that we were among the first in the world to run ebooks alongside our paperback treebooks a decade ago. We’re well ahead of the digital game – and they say it might even turn a buck when it stops raining.
The first ebook title up, ‘Forgive Us Our Press Passes’ by Ian Skidmore, is released in all digital formats today and is available right now for instant download in all formats from all international major and minor ebook retailers and our own website at www.bewrite.net. A big bonus is cover price – little more than the cost of a couple of pints in tap-room currency.
Why kick off with Skiddy’s hilarious memoire? It was the first Revel Barker Publishing title, and Skiddy was the first of Revel’s authors to agree to give ebooks a fair crack o’ the whip. In fact, Skiddy, who has always been an avid reader of anything with words on it, turned to using a Sony ebook-dedicated reading device for recreational reading years ago. He has just opened a second library with a Kindle. Impresses me, does that. Mind you, where Skiddy’s concerned, I’ve always been impressed.
 It took ebooks nearly six centuries to revolutionise Gutenberg’s wonderful basic model; all we have seen over subsequent centuries has been mere superficial refinement of the prototype. A book’s a book and, as Skiddy says, content is king. Story rules.
Now you can read Skiddy’s yarn – and soon many other RBP hack-lits – in beautifully prepared new digital editions, word-faithful to their print equivalent, on electronic platforms from PCs and laptops, through the entire range of new ebook-dedicated reading thingies and tablets, to iPods and ubiquitous Blackberries and smartphones. You can even read them on your TV screen if you know how. Somebody will, no doubt, be reading Skiddy whilst kicking his heels waiting for his train on the Tokyo subway tomorrow. 
A reminder: even if you don’t have a Kindle and sadly found no other fancy new digital gizmo under the Christmas tree, you can read all BeWrite Books ebooks – so all ‘coming soon’ hack-lit – in PDF on your old-fashioned PC, laptop or netbook. Kindle Mobi editions can be read on your home computers and laptops by free download of the Kindle-for-PC app (www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_pc_mkt_lnd?docId=1000426311) and ePub can be read using free Calibre Library software (www.calibre-ebook.com). Just be sure when you want to buy or ask for a review copy to choose the digital format that’s best for you. Any questions or calls for help, simply email Revel or me (ntmarr@bewrite.net).

ALREADY AVAILABLE ON AMAZON. IF YOU BUY IT, OR EVEN IF YOU DON'T ,PLEASE WRITE A FAVOURABLE REVIEW. LYING IS PERMISSIBLE - xxxx skiddy

HEAVENLY PAVILIONS

I stand within batting range of my century, but as I survey from my octogenarian crease the players who surround me, the temptation to declare and scurry back to the Celestial Pavilion is intense.
In a week when its economies have cost the World Service three million listeners, the BBC announces that it is spending £1billion on a refurbishment of Broadcasting House in central London, including a £1.6million “sculpture” that will function as a pavement. It has been created by the Canadian artist Mark Pimlott, and is incorporated into the piazza in the middle of the newly-finished building. The sculpture is broadly horizontal and will be used principally for walking on. Mr Pimlott’s website says that his “discrete interventions are intended to reveal the essential characteristics of place.
”
The BBC seems obsessed with pavements. It has been criticised for hiring 30 dogs and their owners to foul a street in Preston for a documentary designed to show what Britain will be like when the cuts in local government spending bite. The council could turn a nice profit. Letting dogs foul streets is an offence punishable with a heavy fine.

Even more distressing is Sky Television's sacking of two sports reporters for saying rude things about a referee. I can see little point in commenting on a spectacle in a medium for which the main attraction is that the audience can see what is going on for themselves.Yet, commentators, would you believe, are paid £1 million a year for saying things which few spectators agree with. To be honest, I cannot see why anyone would want to watch twenty-two men in short trousers kicking a ball round a lawn. Having said that, I have always assumed that saying rude things about the referee is a major part of the entertainment.

The deeper you examine this episode the more curious it becomes. The exchange between Andy Gray and Richard Keys happened in a private conversation which took place off camera after the game was over. The feisty assistant referee Sian Massey, the butt of it, did not answer the phone when Keys rang to apologise. She told The Guardian: "Perhaps Richard thought I was too busy making the tea and washing up to take his call. West Ham's future in the Olympic Stadium is of far more significance to me than his future. It is most unfortunate that he has chosen to add insult to injury today by suggesting that this incident has done me a favour by getting West Ham out of the press, as, after all, I did not ask to be part of his sexist tirade. This is not about an apology to me, but about an apology to all women. Richard represents views that myself and those who work in the business of football find totally dinosaur."

In the event both loud mouths quickly moved into new jobs but their victim the refereee was barred from officiating at a match. Earlier in the week what started as a suspension escalated to the sack for Andy Gray and the forced resignation of Keys for earlier misogynisms. Keys had made inappropriate remarks about ”fancying” another player's girlfriend. As my lady barber said, any right thinking lady would take that as a compliment. Gray's sacking was the result of something much worse. He asked his fellow presenter Charlotte Jackson, again off camera, to tuck his microphone lead into his trousers. Miss Jackson, who has made no complaint, is a model who regularly posed for sexy photographs to bolster her bid to be a sexy presenter on Sky.

Curiously, these two incidents happened some time ago and one wonders which of their colleagues posted the incidents on You Tube, having presumably hoarded them for months awaiting an opportunity when they would do most harm.

For Gray, according to The Daily Mail, it was the culmination of a career of unremitting misogyny. Behaviour which might have led to the sack over a number of years. Key hinted that “dark forces” were responsible. It is true that Gray is amongst those mini-celebrities who are suing The News of the World - like Sky, owned by Rupert “Stinker” Murdoch - for tapping their mobile phones. Rupert Murdoch is at present campaigning to be allowed to buy the few remaining shares in Sky which other people owned.

Opposition to the bid has already cost a cabinet minister his career. It is pure coincidence that Murdoch recently dined with the Prime Minister. Just as it is public spirit which is leading him to grass on his editorial staff, alleged to be among the phone tappers. The investigation has been going on for five years without a hint of intervention..

This curious behaviour is not confined to Murdoch. Tabloid newspapers blame the Metropolitan Police for the delay. The Met is dragging its feet, it is claimed, because The News of the World has them in its pay. In my day there were two certain ways to get information from the police. Either join the Masons or pay for it in cash or kind.

When I was appointed Night News Editor, another executive phoned me. “I had no idea you were a Mason,” he said. “I'm not, “ I said. “Then how did you get the job?” he wanted to know.
Might there not be another reason for the delay?


THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

A fellow broadcaster, Mike Flynn delving into the past, told me about a listener, Harry Harthill, a traffic warden from Tonyrefail, who wrote daily to him and Terry Wogan. “I must have had thousands of letters from him over the decade at Radio Wales but one stuck out in particular and I am sure will strike a chord with you.
Harry said, 'When an old person dies it is like a library going up in flames!'”

DANGER.MEN AT SHIRK

Police Officers are being told not to go into the new £1million park in Wisbech, down the road-from here - for health and safety reasons. The park has been plagued by yobs who have already caused £5,000 worth of damage. Instead of ensuring the children get a telling off, Inspector Andy Sullivan has banned officers from the park in Wisbech, Cambs. He told the local council that the new adventure playground was too dangerous after 8 pm.

THE PAST IS MY FAVOURITE COUNTRY

A millionaire friend who flies his own autographed aeroplane and winters in Thailand counsels me against nostalgia. What can I do? The past is my planet and they do things better there. I am only attached to the 21st century for rations and accommodation, and my idea of hell would be to live in Thailand and have the responsibility of running an aeroplane. It was bad enough owning a boat. The past has a beginning and an end but the present has only a beginning, which merges into the future, and that is somewhere I have no wish to go. Indeed, I often wonder if it will exist. Life comes without guarantees. Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot murdered and enslaved millions but it was the kindly Allies who fire bombed Tokyo and Dresden and dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima.

Life was more fun in the past. Now our entertainment veers from the coarseness of Connolly to the disaffected graduates who dispense the humour of dissatisfaction. I have been reading a biography of Gypsy Rose Lee. Author Karen Abbot recalled old vaudeville acts:


“The man who guzzled hot molten lava and belched up coins, the man who swallowed a goldfish and a baby shark and asked the audience which should reappear first, the man who lit gunpowder on his tongue, the man who discovered that his sneeze made audiences laugh and worked it into his routine, honing, over the course of a year, the mechanics of twitching his nostrils and cranking his jaw, the exaggerated intake of breath and sputtering of lips. A performer called 'The Human Fish' ate a banana, played a trombone, and read a newspaper while submerged in a tank of water. Another had a 'cat piano,' an act featuring live cats in wire cages that meowed Gregorio Allegri's Miserere when their tails were pulled (in reality the performer yanked on artificial tails and did all the meowing himself).

"Alonzo the Miracle Man lit and smoked a cigarette, brushed his teeth and combed his hair, and buttoned his shirt - miracles since he had been born without arms. Louise and June were particularly fond of Lady Alice, an old dowager who wore elegant beaded gowns and performed with rats. The runt settled on the crown of her head, a miniature kazoo clenched between teeth like grains of rice. He breathed a tuneless harmony while the rest of the litter began a slow parade across Lady Alice's outstretched arms, marching from the tip of one middle finger to the other. The girls never understood how Lady Alice controlled the rodents - their own animals weren't quite so obedient - until one day she revealed her secret: a trail of Cream of Wheat slathered on her neck and shoulders.



It is in the past that the explanation of the present lies. I have often wondered why the sensitive Americans I know, cultured, kindly and generous, should be so badly led. Gore Vidal exposed the criminal leadership which was endemic.
Even the avuncular Franklin Delano Roosevelt was heir to the huge Delano opium fortune.

James Bradley, in his book “The Imperial Cruise”, paints a terrible picture:


"Franklin's grandfather Warren Delano had for years skulked around [China's] Pearl River Delta dealing drugs. Delano had run offices in Canton and Hong Kong. During business hours, Chinese criminals would pay him cash and receive an opium chit. At night, Scrambling Crabs - long, sleek, heavily armed crafts - rowed out into the Pearl River Delta to Delano's floating warehouses, where they received their Jesus opium under the cover of darkness. The profits were enormous, and at his death Delano left his daughter Sara a fortune that she lavished on her only son.

"The Delanos were not alone. Many of New England's great families made their fortunes dealing drugs in China. The Cabot family of Boston endowed Harvard with opium money, while Yale's famous Skull and Bones society was funded by the biggest American opium dealers of them all - the Russell family. The most famous landmark on the Columbia University campus is the Low Memorial Library, which honors Abiel Low, a New York boy who made it big in the Pearl River Delta and bankrolled the first cable across the Atlantic. Princeton University's first big benefactor, John Green, sold opium in the Pearl River Delta with Warren Delano.

"The list goes on and on: Boston's John Murray Forbes's opium profits financed the career of transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson and bankrolled the Bell Telephone Company. Thomas Perkins founded America's first commercial railroad and funded the Boston Athenaeum. These wealthy and powerful drug-dealing families combined to create dynasties."

The past warns us of future dangers. Fifty years ago, Eisenhower warned the nation that a ballooning military-industrial complex could not co-exist “with the peaceful intentions of our nation”.

Thomas Jefferson went further. He said: "I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.”

Do not knock the past. It was the nursery of the present.