a bookish tales

A visit to a second-hand bookshop is a chastening experience for a writer. Shelf after shelf of authors, once feted but now completely forgotten, whilst on bookstalls a badly written pornographic novel sells fifty million copies. Only rarely does one come across copies of "Fame Is The Spur” which by a country mile is the finest novel I have ever read. An even greater tragedy is that neither Howard Spring, nor his contemporary Ivor Novello, nor the hilarious writer the amiable Gwyn Thomas, three of the finest creative artists Wales ever produced, are remembered in their native land. If only they had been Welsh speakers the halls would still be ringing with their praise.
Howard Spring, Britain’s best selling author in the Sixties, was born in abject poverty in Cardiff in the late 19th century. The description closest to his own childhood occurs in “Fame Is The Spur”. He wrote 14 novels, three plays, three children’s books, a volume of literary criticism and between 1939 and 1946 three semi-autobiographical memoirs.
He was one of nine children, two of whom died in childhood and a third as a soldier in World War 1 at Arras. His father was an Irish jobbing gardener who never earned more than a pound a week and died young leaving his wife to bring up the brood. He was an irritable, taciturn man who loved literature. He made his children read aloud in turns from “The Pilgrim's Progress”. If they mispronounced a word twice he clouted them. Though obviously from a good family he would never speak of his past. Spring remembered that despite the family’s poverty academics from the University often called to have long talks with him.
Howard, a sickly child, at the age of ten when his father died helped the family by chopping and selling firewood, picking rhubarb and working sixteen hours every Saturday as an errand boy. His wages were a dinner, a shilling and a couple of herrings 'for charity'. He lost the job when he took a Saturday off to sit for a scholarship.
He left school at 12 to become first an errand boy to a butcher and then a junior clerk in a shipping office. At home the family slept top to toe with legs folded in the same bed. There was no bathroom, just a ritual 'wash all over'. He left for work before eight in the morning and returned after six in the evening for four shillings a week. His mother took in washing and her only relaxation was reading Dickens.
He had his first holiday when he was 17. He and his elder brother who were inseparable decided to got to Bideford. They saved the twelve shillings and sixpence each needed for their digs and a few shillings for expenses. They had no money for fares. They used Howard’s newspaper pass for a free ride on the paddle steamer from Cardiff to Ilfracombe and proposed to walk the twenty miles to Bideford carrying a huge portmanteau containing the books without which they never moved. After ten miles, virtually collapsing in the summer heat, they decided to use the few shillings they had saved for treats on train fares for the rest of the journey.
When he was 13, a sister who cleaned the home of a sub-editor had learned there was a vacancy on his paper, the South Wales Echo, for a messenger boy and copy taker. He got he job and while there submitted stories and dramatic criticism to the South Wales Daily News (now the Western Mail). Studying at night school he eventually became a reporter and nine years later moved to Yorkshire where he worked for the Yorkshire Observer. He had three and a half happy years in Bradford before he moved to the Manchester Guardian



He wrote his first book, a children’s story “Darky and Co” in 1932. His first adult book, the remarkable “Shabby Tiger”, was published in 1934. One of the characters, Rachel Rosing, so fascinated him that he made her the centre of his next book “Rachel Rosing”. But it was his third book “My Son, My Son”, first published as “ Absolom, Absolom”, that made him a best-selling author all over the world. The inspiration for that book had come to him on a train journey when he saw a water trough and thought “What a place for a murderer to hide in!” On a slip of paper he wrote a brief synopsis in the five minutes the train was halted. That night he began writing the book which took him fourteen months.
I met him briefly in Manchester when I was a young reporter. He advised me always to keep a notebook and to write in it every new word I came upon. “When you write it down you will never forget it,” he said.
It is the wisest advice any writer can receive.

I If the memory of GwynThomas survives it will be of a chubby humorist stuck in the corner of the literary pub with his Celtic contemporary Brendan Behan. His novels celebrated the working class world of the Rhondda Valley He was born in Cymmer, Porth in the  Valley, the youngest of 12 children to coal miner Walter Morgan Thomas and his wife. His mother died when he was aged six, and he was resultantly brought up by his sister, often with handouts from the local soup kitchen.

After winning a scholarship to Oxford.

On graduation and wanting to be a writer, Thomas struggled to establish himself during the 1930s depression. He took on part-time lecturing jobs across England, while trying to get his novel Sorrow For Thy Sons published.[1]

Post war, his wife decided to send some of his short stories to three publishers, who all accepted the scripts for publication. Approached in 1951 by a BBC Radio Wales producer to write for the radio, he returned to his childhood memories of 1920s South Wales to create Gazuka! A delightful celebration of a bizarre musical instrumentt

He became a regular on chat shows such as the Brain's Trust, and after 20 years of teaching in 1962 he became a full-time writer and broadcaster, However, due to a combination of diabetes, heavy drinking and smoking, his health began to fail in the late 1960s. In 1981 Thomas collapsed and died on 13 April, shortly before his 68th birthday.

My great friend was his sister in law Irene Thomas, the ex chorus girl and star of “Rround Britain Quiz where she regularly beat academic heavyweights. I met Gwyn from time to time in the BBC's Cardiff Studio where he was venerated as a peerless broadcaster and he was the funniest man I have ever met. He wore a pork pie hat and lived in a cloud of words and cigarette smoke

Another artist who has slipped between time's floorboards into a dusty cellar is the distinguished concert pianist Bernard Roberts who once had international critics reaching for superlatives. Professor at the Royal College of Music, the most talented of a very talented musical family, he could talk about music in such a way as to make it understandable even to this non-musical interviewer. Best of all ,when I went to his home deep in the wild countryside beyond Harlech, he let me play with his model train set. It reproduced the line, running to a strict timetable, from Central Station in Manchester to St Pancras. It symbolises his journey through life.
“I was born at Chorlton cum Hardy, the first station after Central, and train noises were the first noises I heard,” he told me.
Before moving to Wales he lived in Leicester and studied in London. His father was assistant librarian at Manchester's John Ryland's, one of the world’s finest libraries, and assistant music critic of the Manchester Guardian under Neville Cardus. His parents met when his father went for an audition for the organist’s post at a Chorlton Congregational Church and his mother was on the audition panel.
“I think she fancied him. He got the job and they got married,” said Roberts. It was a marriage of musical minds. She had studied at the Royal College in Manchester.
When his parents heard him playing Clementi by ear at the age of four they decided it was time the youngest Roberts studied too. Before he was ten he read orchestral scores with ease and in 1949 he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music.
He played all over Europe and frequently broadcast on Radio 3. He liked the piano, a surprisingly rare gift in his trade. “Pianos are one of the horrors of being a pianist. A recital is like Russian Roulette. Every piano is different. Age, condition, maker. Like meeting someone new. You need time to get to know them before a concert.
“I went recently to choose a new piano. There was a line of them, made by the same firm within a year. All good but every one good in a different way. One bright, one mellow, one tender, another arresting. Depending on the quality of the felt, the wood - all sort of things.”
Next to the piano he loved Beethoven.
“He strives the most and transforms the most. He goes through a kind of death and resurrection. He suffers tremendously. The idea of being an outgoing performer, turned in on himself through deafness and having to struggle with this infirmity, then producing these works out of his inner hearing, is quite wonderful and very moving.
“One can identify with him. Some composers are so beautiful it is impossible to identify with them. I love Bach but I don’t know who he was as a man. I don’t know who Mozart was. It is very difficult to hear the touch of humanity in their almost perfect music.
“Mozart was more miraculous than Beethoven. And Bach is totally miraculous. To be able to conceive the B Minor Mass and write it down is quite astonishing. But I cannot understand them the way I understand Beethoven.”
So affable was Bernard Roberts, so wise in such a gentle way, I was emboldened to ask him a question I have carried in my non-musical head all my life: What is music?
“Music is an orderly succession of sounds which have a certain relationship. Within one note there is a harmonic series which contains almost all the others, just as one colour contains other colours. It is a completely natural phenomenon. You can strike a glass and hear all these harmonics. In one note there is virtually the whole scale as we know it.
“The most exciting thing about music happens when you start playing one note after another, because then you find that all the notes have a relationship. Your musical soul is being moved because you are being passed from one note to another.
“But it is the interval between the notes that is mysterious. I can play C and I can play G. What moves you is what lives between them. But this is the point which places you in the realm of the untouchable or the spiritual. It is not the silence: it is the inner space which exists between sounds.
“Tone quality, the difference between the oboe and the violin, is beautiful, but essentially the notes themselves contain the expressive quality which lives between them. Melody usually lives between an audible range, say an octave. But the fence within which it lives can be narrowed or extended.”



THOSE WERE THE DAYS
From the splendidly named Sir Laming Worthington-Evans, secretary of state for war nearly a century ago: "If the Arab population realised that the peaceful control of Mesopotamia ultimately depends on our intention of bombing women and children, I'm very doubtful if we shall gain that acquiescence of the fathers and husbands of Mesopotamia to which the Secretary of State for the Colonies looks forward." He was referring to Iraq in the 1920s; he could have been talking about Syria today.

BREAD AND CIRCUSES

We are all Romans now so let us harken to the words of that supreme classicist Boris Notquitegoodunov:

“Team GB’s gluttonous desire for gold shows no sign of being sated. Their extraordinary efforts have brought rapture to streets, parks and living rooms in London and all over the country, if not the planet.”


The chief executive of Coca-Cola, that well known drug, defended the role of Olympic sponsors saying that without them the Games would not be anything like as “rich an event”.


Lord Moynihan wants the Government to improve school sports, apparently unaware that the government encouraged Heads to sell school sports fields.


Stop the world! One Elwyn Court, March, wishes to get off.


After being tricked into accidentally watching some luckless brutes hurl themselves over a fence I did find myself cheering Sir Steve Redgrave.
Five seconds after he won a fourth rowing gold some commentator had asked for his reaction. "If I ever sound like I might do this again," he puffed, "F**kin' shoot me."


If - and I doubt it - the Olympics are remembered for anything by mid- October it is the threat that Boris is going to be our next Prime Minister. I would have thought we have had enough experience of Bullingdon hearties to put us off for life; though he has shown talent for one essential attribute: he is a good talker. Our present leaders Tweedledumb and Tweedleme got their jobs by talking. David Davis, who showed principle and common-sense, lost by a breath. Boris wins Freudian hearts and minds by waving the Union Jack and shouting for a ladder whilst dangling helplessly from a wire pulled by an inefficient European. A potent job description


His next crowd puller will be to drift helplessly heavenwards in a hot air balloon which can only be controlled by deflation. A sure vote-winner.


Regeneration of London, I hear you ask? Don't ask me. Ask any London trader. The streets of the capital are deserted. Tourists are practically down to single figures, restaurants are empty, shops are all but giving away goods and hotels are reducing prices in what should be their best months. Flat lining Britain is down to its last luncheon voucher; our most respectable bank is accused of laundering billions of dollars of blood money; staff at Care Homes for the mentally unwell are only marginally kinder than the guards in the Bastille; old people's homes and public lavatories are closing; welfare is being cut...


Outside the magic Olympian Home of the Gods amateur sports clubs are closing for lack of funds; very few state schools still have playing fields; overseas trading is back to beads and mirrors level and the world economy is in the unbreakable grasp of an Uber Mafia. Wall Street is badmouthing British banks in a move to wrest dominance from the City.


But see us ride a bike, a horse, or jump over a fence to win fools' gold medals. That is what it means to be British.


Regeneration? Do we have to have an elaborate sports day before slums can be cleared? If I want planning permission for a greenhouse, do I have to dig a swimming pool in the lawn? If we had not wasted billions on side shows we could have cleared twice as many slums. America spent the money it saved by not having the Games on real regeneration.


Demonstrations of athletic prowess? They are exclusively glorifying gold medal winners. Hear our asinine commentators... “He will have to make do with a silver,” one brays. Eclair Balding, the Head Girl who objected to being called a dyke on a bike and advised a winning jockey to get his teeth fixed, headed a feeding frenzy round a Chinese school child. She DID win a gold medal in record time but all that proved was that she was high on drugs, the pack claimed. Her parents told us Chinese training methods are so hard that when she phoned home she was always crying and a top official confirmed she had been tested free of drugs.
The aptly named Gaby Logan devotes a segment of her programme to the Underdog of the Week. She mocks competitors who don't do well to the soundtrack of a silly tune. A poor reward for the years of training any athlete must undergo just to qualify.
****************************
My own choice of sporting dexterity involves the skilful use of the knife and fork - or indeed the chopstick.


The very names of Chinese food are celebratory... Five Willows fish; Chicken Chessmen; Velvet and Satin Chicken, made with golden needles (dried lily flowers) and cloud ears (tasty fungus); Yang Chow; Lion’s Head (sounds more exciting than meat balls); and my favourite, Cloud Swallows, chicken-filled filo pastry, moulded to resemble Imperial Goldfish.
The Chinese take food and drink with becoming seriousness. In his seminal book “The Importance of Living” the Chinese scholar Lin Yutang lists twenty-one proper moments for drinking tea, including “when the children are at school”. It is bad manners to eat until all are ready or the host says “Sack fen” (nice rice). Rude to point chopsticks upwards or at anyone, but not to spit out bones or lift your bowl to your mouth. When replete, place chopsticks horizontally on plate, not bowl.
Chinese New Year marks the return of the God of the Kitchen after ascending to heaven to report on his earthly family to Sheung Duy, the Almighty God. Back in those happy days when we lived in Wales, at Chinese banquets we all wore finery to pay respect to ancestors, family and friends. I was able to omit the tradition of settling all debts. I am a dead ringer for the Chinese God of Prosperity, who is mostly belly, though there, alas, the resemblance ends (HSBC managers please note.)
The best banquet I have ever eaten included two kinds of soup,Thai chicken salad, Cantonese roast pork, Japanese sushi, potato cakes, chicken wings and tempura, Chinese dumpling, lobster crackers, Dim Sum, spare rib, roast duck, Malay pork satay, Mongolian beef, Indonesian chicken curry, Thai red curry and four different puddings. As George Meredith wisely said, “Kissing don’t last; cookery do!”



One Chinese New Year I won a rabbit in the raffle. Thank Sheung Duy, I did not win a dragon.



MY HEROES REVISITED
Now that the newspaper column has become the Chiltern Hundreds for unwanted editors and their wives, it gives a poignant pleasure to read again two of the masters of the genre. (Note to the young or foreign: The Chiltern Hundreds is the office without power given to politicians who have outlived their usefulness but could turn nasty if abandoned.)
“Cassandra at His Finest and Funniest” and “The Best of Mulchrone” have both been re-published by Revel Barker, rapidly becoming Archivist to our Inky Trade.
Inevitably comparisons are made. My own view is that Cassandra had the edge on Mulchrone, which is a bit like saying Byron had the edge on Milton.
I would put Cassandra on a level with the great essayists like Lamb, Hazlitt, Coleridge at his best and de Quincey. And that is the highest compliment I can pay. Only Montaigne reigns supreme. But he, of course, invented the genre.
Viewed as literature, such columnists as Bill Connor (Cassandra), Mulchrone and Ian Mackay (who founded their school in the News Chronicle) are truer to their roots in Montaigne than the novel has been to its beginnings. From Thomas Deloney, the first  novelist, a pedlar who tramped the roads of East Anglia in the days of the first Elizabeth, selling his tales on market stalls, through the “journey” books of Fielding et alia to the last thriller novels of Dickens and Wilkie Collins, only the detective novel has followed a discernible succession.
Mulchrone, Connor and Mackay obeyed Montaigne’s dictum that the only subject he was qualified to write about was himself.
They had his eye for anecdote. He tells of an old woman in his village who was raped by fourteen soldiers and said it was the only time she had ever been pleasured without sin. He busied himself amongst life’s trifles and gave them importance.
Of the three writers under advisement, Mulchrone is, in my view, the best reporter. His account of the Denbigh Pie is my favourite piece of reporting. It is written with love, but with a gimlet eye that misses nothing. He was equally good on greater occasions like the wedding of Princess Alexandra to the Hon Angus Ogilvy, in which he correctly saw a love match.
“Their happiness in each other lit the old stones, dimmed the light of the monster called TV, put pomp in its place,” he wrote.
And later: “They smiled their joy right at the great challenging head of the Archbishop of Canterbury. And his Grace of Canterbury just had to smile back ….... IT WAS AS IF THE NORTH FORELAND HAD BROKEN INTO A GRIN.”
To appreciate that magnificent line you would have to have seen Archbishop Ramsay who was forever old. Mulchrone denied authorship of his most famous line “Two rivers flowed…” About the only writer I know who would have been so honest.
Cassandra’s quiver of words was bigger and he used it to deadlier effect: “A hangover is when your mouth tastes like a tram driver’s glove. When your boots seem to be steaming and your eyes burn in their sockets like hot gooseberries.”
He was a great Word War Wager, his invective darkening the skies like the arrow night of Crecy. His hatred of the Christmas Card Artillery was Olympian. “I am an old gunner in the Christmas card Artillery…”
I only met Cassandra once, when we briefly shared a urinal in Withy Grove, Manchester. Mulchrone was an old and deeply valued friend. Mackay I met occasionally in the Manchester Arms where he shared a drink with another of my heroes, Whitney Rowland.
I once told Victoria de Los Angeles that if my house caught fire the first thing I would save would be her recording with Jussi Bjorling of “La Boheme”. I lied. I would save Cassandra, Mulchrone, and Mackay.
Happily their tradition of fine writing survives. Add the name of Geoff Mather who shed gold on the pages of the Daily Express in the days when it was still a newspaper and happily survives to write a sparkling weekly blog. Try him at: http://www.northtrek.co.uk

BRING BACK THE QUILL

My battle with the New Age makes a flash in the pan of the Hundred Years War. I have had a calendar watch for twenty years and I still cannot set the date. My Weather Master refused to disclose the temperature. I tend to wander off in department stores whilst my wife chooses the clothes she will inevitably return on her next visit. I have had four mobile phones to summon help but have not so far been able to make a call.jThe all-singing, all dancing scanner/printer won't but the Digital Voice Recorder seemed a gift from heaven. Speak your thoughts and watch them appear as if by magic on your manuscript.
Simply a matter of slipping in the CD provided, following the instructions which will appear on your screen and it's away dulled digit. Except that it wasn’t. The process defeated two highly trained computer mechanics when I failed. I took wider advice. Upgrade it, I was advised. So I set aside Dragon Speaking 10 and bought Dragon Speaking 11 CD.
That didn’t work either so I contacted Amazon for a refund. No can do, said Amazon. You have already opened the envelope. I wondered how I could have found out it was the wrong software without opening the envelope. But I contacted Nuance who supply the software and a nice chap said, “What software have you got?” and I told him with quiet pride I not only had Software 10 but I had also paid £40 for software 11, and he said “Well neither is any good.” Olympus had given me the wrong software, he said. But obliging chap that he was, he offered to download software 10.1 which he said was the appropriate CD, and he did.
I keyed it in and clicked where ordered. At first everything went as promised and then I was instructed to key in my customer number and it was rejected. I tried again and again. I was rejected. All over the next two days I tried and was rejected again and again.
At this point I must have lost my nerve because I went scurrying back to a nice lady at Nuance with whom by this time I was on Christian name terms. She very kindly tried the download herself and said it had worked for her. So I went back to the keyboard and this time a notice appeared saying it was a zip file and if I would press the download button all would be well. So I pressed the download button and got a notice saying if I would press another download button my problems would be over.
At this point my typing finger objected. It said it was working harder than ever and I had told it how I was going to make things easier for it. I was in no mood for argument so I rapped its knuckle and it went on its weary way. This time pressing the button brought a notice from someone called Reg Work, saying there were 165 errors on the machine and offering, very sportingly, to clear things up with a free trial. Up to this time there had been a noticeable shortage of gift horses so with a glad cry I complied. And that pressure on a button brought a bill for £34, which I thought might be my one finger getting its own back, but I paid and got another button telling me that my life would be made easy if I backed up my files. By now I was too weak to demur and that cost me another ten quid. I forget what the next tempting offer was but I know that when I had accepted it I was down £100 over a five-minute involuntary spending spree. So I emailed my friend Flora on Nuance in a craven bid for sympathy.
She obviously had summed up my degree of technical expertise by this time because she said probably the best idea would be to ask Olympus who sold the recorder to send me a CD 10.1 which would get round the problem with ease.
And there the matter has ended and I await the next email with a nervous Cousteau-like twitch.
Except that I got an email from some one called Trial Play telling me that my Winzip software was ready and if I would press the download below it would be delivered. I pressed the download and nothing happened. By this time I was whimpering noisily so I emailed Trial Play support and back came an email quick as a flash. It said they would answer my esteemed enquiry in 48 hours.

At which point I broke into song, a reedy tenor with nervous gulps: “I’ll join the Legion, that’s what I’ll do....and in some far distant region I’ll fight for the right .....” but the rest of that stirring aria from the Red Shadow was drowned in melancholy.

WHAT'S IN A NAME

Long ago when the world was still grown up - say until the 1950’s - there were Yanks and Red Indians, Paddies and Jocks, Taffs and Eyties, Frogs and Krauts, and God Botherers and Left Footers.

Unthinkable in these enlightened times when, according to a Broadcasting Standards Survey we once debated on my radio programme “The Big Idea”, Jew and Spastic are now serious swear words.

But in that terrible past old ladies were not frightened to leave their homes nor beaten to death in them. Teachers taught, and education had not yet been replaced by theories of how it should be done. Few schoolchildren were illiterate, hardly any pregnant, and Foreign Secretaries paid for their mistresses on trips. It wasn’t a capital offence to be a catholic or a protestant.

There was still a wicked British Empire - but Africa had not collapsed into anarchy. You could turn on a radio or a TV set without being greeted with a mouthful of obscenities and eroticism was conveyed, not photographed. Governments dealt only in major issues and you could trust local councils to repair the drains.

Christmas started in December and parents, not children, decided what clothes they wore. At school, uniforms were universal so that poorer children would not be sartorially embarrassed by richer classmates. You did not have to be fit to risk going to hospital, where you are now likely to come out with more germs than you were admitted with.

The police hadn’t discovered how much easier life was if they confined their attentions to respectable taxpayers and £2,000 was the fine for running a brothel, not (as in the fairly recent past) for selling an oxtail. I am not sure that even then you could leave your keys in your car or your front door. But there was hardly a shop with an iron grille and aspirin was the strongest drug.

There were even people sufficiently familiar with our historic past to know - as I keep having to point out - that “welshing” was an insult to the English, not the Welsh. In medieval Wales, English law was confined to the castle towns. In the countryside outside, Welsh law prevailed. Vide, place names like Welsh Frankton. English traders who got into debt in the castle towns would abscond to the “Welshery” and were said to have “welshed”.

In 1924, in his fine book “In Search of Wales”, H.V Morton pointed out there was no blame for the Welsh either in the famous lampoon “Taffy was a Welshman...” The rhyme is a corruption of a Low Dutch lampoon on priests whose tall black hats were called Tayfs.

TALE PIECE

.......... And God spoke unto Adam and He said:

"Why does it take you so long to come to the phone?"

Adam said: "Have you seen the size of this garden?

Also I wish you would have a word with that angel you sent

with a blazing sword. I've got scorch marks on the dahlias and

the heat is bringing on the chrysanths too early........"

God said: "The Angel is Security and outside

my remit.

But there has obviously been a mistake.

He shouldn't be there till apple picking....... "

God said: "I wanted Dobermans but Finance

estimate an overall saving with flames that is very impressive.

It's something they picked up from the Competition.

We are working on garden staffing levels.

Research and Development were going to let you invent the

plough, then we planned electricity

which I personally am very excited about and cannot wait to

create Farraday."

Adam said: "Talk is cheap. When do I get to invent the

plough?"

God said: "R and D have come up with this new concept.

Run it up the tree trunk and see if it flaps."

Adam said;: "God,sometimes you say things which are a mystery

to me...."

God said: "Goes with the territory. But

about this R and D idea. It will do the gardening; it's an

entertainment concept and does home nursing. R and D are working

on a modem called sex which completely

does away with the spare rib method I originally planned.

It will need a User Manual. I'm thinking of calling it

the Ten Commandments."

Adam said: "Does this machine have a name?"

God said: "What's in a name,as Shakespeare is

going to say. We were going to call it a slave and then a

skivvy but Marketing said names like that give off the wrong

vibes, consumer-wise. So what we finally came up with was

Woman.

“What takes the Woe out of Man....Woman. Neat,eh?

Copywriting and Graphics reckon we could achieve a 98 per

cent penetration of A and AB markets."

Adam said: "I want an assurance from management that this

woman machine will never be programmed to take executive

decisions......"

And God spoke and He said: "Thursday already? I have to

go. I have two days creating before my rest day...."

And He rang off.

It was only later when Eve harvested the

apples and there was this Leak from

Head Office about relocation that Adam remembered he had

been given no guarantees about negative parity for the woman

machine.

And Adam was sore afraid.

DRINK TO ME ONLY WITH THINE IOU

sThirty years ago I was awarded the drinker's knighthood “Arise Cirrhosis”. Twenty-three years ago a lifetime's fieldwork in competitive drinking was acknowledged with the award of diabetics Mark Two. That was the birthday my son - “Oh Sharper than a Serpent's tooth” - made me a present of sixty bottles of spring water.

The Ferret should have got some kind of award for forty-two years of attempting to dash the glass from my lips. Negotiations for a cease supping have been going on at Skidmore Parva for the thick end of half a century. They reached their apogee on that fateful birthday, which was followed by five years in desert conditions. Oddly enough the treaty broke down during a coach trip down the Loire. I was alarmed to discover that also on the coach was an ex-girl friend. When a trip was mooted to a vineyard I bravely opted for the alternative which was a visit to a church.

“I think I'll go with you,” said the ex. The ferret is very relaxed in these matters. When I am moved to sparkle at a pretty girl she laughs derisively but I know my limits. I hastily beat a retreat to the vineyard where I could not resist a proffered Sancerre, the flinty taste of which was appreciated by my favourite writer Hemingway. I sipped daintily at no more than a couple of bottles as a Homage to Hem. Flown with wine and impertinence, I was bold enough to add a clause to the contract permitting me to drink when abroad.

As luck would have it Rod Henshal, my partner in a programme I did for Australian radio, proposed a visit and the question of entertaining him came up. Fortunately I remembered a builder I knew called Shone who divided his time between a villa in Portugal and a rather nice manor house in Chester. When his marriage broke up he kept hold of the Cheshire house by declaring it Portuguese territory.

My ancestors were Norman so I declared our house, Aberbraint, part of France. It must have appealed to my wife's highly developed sense of the absurd because she agreed.

We left our riverside manor house, built by One Leg Paget, Wellington's cavalry commander at Waterloo,when my wife inherited a Fenland stately bungalow over which I have no property rights. It was some years before I got her to agree to champagne with our fish and chips on Friday and libations for the rest of the weekend. Because she is posh I naturally took that to mean Friday to Monday but was voted down. Friday was OK because she likes champagne with her fish and chips but Monday is dry.

She won in the end because I have lost the taste for alcohol.

Teetotalism is dangerous. It allows you to do much sillier things than ever you did as a drunk. I have been persuading myself that since I seldom venture further than the garden the last thing I need is an Ipad. Last week in a bout of sober frenzy I bought one and spent the next days proving that I would never be able to make it work. So I sent it back, and because I had already given my Kindle to my wife I bought a Kindle Touch. Before I even opened that I had to spend the better part of a day adapting my wife's Kindle to her needs. Then began the worst three days of my life. The Kindle Touch is more than a little touched itself. It refuses point blank to do anything it purports to do and my fingers are so fat they punch several keys at a time on the keyboard. In consequence it took several hours creating a password of seven letters for the router. I do not even like to recall how long it took to copy my books, newspapers and magazines from her Kindle to my Touch. I finished it this morning - and then the world fell in. The postman brought an anonymous gift from a well wisher.
It was a Nexus7 tablet.
I should have swallowed it. The guide to this fiendish machine was printed online, an innovation praised by one purchaser who crowed his joy that Nexus had dispensed with printed guides: “Grandfatherly concepts have no place in the 21^st century.” But by the time this great-grandfather has read the instruction online and gone back to the item awaiting change he has forgotten what the instructions were. So I sought aid from some nice people to whom I have become close. They are the Indian gentlemen from Amazon.
This was their reply:
“If a Kindle application is not installed on your Nexus 7, please install it.

“Kindle for Android can be installed on Android devices running OS 2.2 or greater.

To see what version your Android device has, tap the Menu button from the home screen, choose 'Settings', then tap on 'About tablet'. The version number can be found under Firmware version.

To install Kindle for Android through the Android Market, tap the 'Market' icon and search for Kindle. Tap on Kindle for Android to open the application’s detail page and follow the instructions to install. Android devices that do not have the Google Play Store pre-installed may not be supported.

“If you are running Android OS 2.1, you will still have the option to download Kindle for Android version 3.2 from the Google Play Store.

Please note, Android devices that do not have the Google Play Store pre-installed may not be compatible with the Kindle for Android app. If you encounter an issue installing Kindle for Android, please confirm your device has the Google Play Store app pre-installed before troubleshooting further.”

Tomorrow I will set the dog on the postman.
****************************************************



It has been a funny sort of week.

We had an email this morning purporting to be from an old chum saying he was broke and desperate for a loan after being mugged on holiday. It was unlikely. He has just sold the business which he created from scratch for £115 million. I sent him this: “To get such a letter from a distinguished member of the Rich List over so many years is both flattering and humbling. I can offer 50 pence or a luncheon voucher plus a small collection of centimes involuntarily collected on a day trip to Calais. Any use? Ian P.S. Celia can offer half a loaf of stale bred for your race horses if you can tell us where in Newmarket they are stabled.” He replied: “It is always possible to fall on hard times! Centimes, Euros, Yen, $, they all come in handy! Your offers are therefore hugely welcome and should be sent to the nearest branch of the Bank of Nigeria - don't delay, it may be closed before you get there. “Likewise Celia's offer of bread for the horses (not cake!) will go down a treat once it gets to the horses in......... where they are now on starvation diets ( a likely story). “The lesson to be learned from being scammed is don't tell anyone your greatest secrets (notably email passwords), but if you do, the compensation is that hundreds of people enquire after your well being which can be very pleasant. It is good to know that people care. It is something that runs countercurrent to what so many would have us believe.”

My fiery friend Alastair McQueen, proud father of an Argyll wounded in Afghanistan, favoured me with the following despatch:

“If His Lordship, at the risk of appearing curmudgeonly, would refer to an email I sent last night with pictures from the Olympics of Servicemen he will see that a special new Tactical Recognition Flash is being sported by our Gallant soldiery. It is an Olympic TRF, believe it or not. Who the hell is paying for this? The soon-to-be-disbanded Argylls can be seen wearing it on the left shoulder rather than on the right where they proudly sport the TRF of their predecessors in the 91st & 93rd of Foot - The Thin Red Line.

You may wish to sound off about this next week.”

Your wish is my command.

The first games of the modern Olympics took place in Athens in 1896. Forty-six years earlier, in 1850, a local surgeon William Penny-Brookes who introduced physical education into British schools, had inspired the fore-runner for the "promotion of moral, physical and intellectual improvement" and although the Games' venue is now decided by international committee rather than by the Wenlock Olympian Society, it still holds its own Olympics every July - "The old woman's" race for a pound of tea may yet be re-introduced! Baron de Coubertin was inspired to create the global event after a visit to the games in Much Wenlock., Shropshire. The influential and wealthy Frenchman was suitably inspired and shared Brookes' dream of a modern, international games.

Since the ersatz IOC fines shop keepers who copy its logo should not the Wenlock Olympiad demand a hefty fine from the plagiarist IOC for copying the entire games?

The opening concert? I enjoyed the tableaux but hope they will do a reprise in English. McCartney called “Hey, Jude” but answer came there none. He is far too old to be out so late. I couldn't abide the singer of Abide With Me. The BBC saved money by having one girl commentating but there was interference from two men that added nothing.

Was the ceremony worth £25 million? No. The money would be better spent re-opening the libraries, lavatories and all the other amenities that have recently been cut to save money.

P.S. We are a two-hour drive from the nearest Olympic venue. Our gardener Paul broke down on a motorway near here at 2 pm on Friday. He summoned assistance. It arrived at 11 pm. “ It's the Olympics,” the mechanic explained.

WE ARE AlLL IMMIGRANTS

Higher levels of immigration over the next 50 years would spare taxpayers from the need to endure much greater austerity, the Government's fiscal watchdog has said.

The aging population will put growing financial pressure on future taxpayers and governments, and Britain will need to undergo an extra £17bn of spending cuts and tax rises to bring down the national debt to 40 per cent of gross domestic product by 2062, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility .

This is on top of the £120bn fiscal consolidation the Chancellor, George Osborne, is pushing through as he seeks to close the budget deficit. But higher levels of immigration would help the economy to grow faster and ease the pressure to cut spending, according to the OBR.

The solution is simple. Get rid of the English. It won't be the first time. Wales and Cornwall remain exuberantly Celtic, Scotland grimly Pictish and Northern England slumbers on in Saxon phlegmatism. The vast swamp that was East Anglia was recreated in the 17^th century by the houseproud Dutch. The English heartland, forbye, is the work of many foreign hands. The Angles and the Saxons imposed order on the wild Celts who still peep out in such words as Avon, for river, Pen for hill and many another.

The Vikings have had a bad press but the rapine and the looting were just the Nordic equivalent of two for one offers in supermarkets. Archaeology has shown they were the greatest trading nation of their day. They too have left their calling card in the language and turned us into a nation of shopkeepers. The four hundred years of Roman occupation of the southern half of England had the most profound effect. They gave us towns and a sense of corporate identity. Our civic society is pure Roman.

The most noticeable change in our character was wrought by the Normans who frenchified whatever they touched as Guthrun the Swineherd pointed out in Ivanhoe, the only book in Scott's debt-driven output which is still remotely readable.

A recent shape-changer has been the American invasion which began in the Thirties with the export of Hollywood and paved the way for the physical invasion of the Forties which shattered a culture that had been growing like barnacles for centuries. Then they made beggars of us with loans we used to buy American products.

Like the Saxon, the most recent invasion was by invitation. It has given us Polish plumbers, saved agriculture and the NHS from extinction and created a revolutionary industrial work force which doesn't strike. In my time as a reporter I watched strikers kill the Merchant Navy, the docks and the car industry. The good ship Windrush saved us. The black race will save the Church. Unlike the dwindling ranks of the Anglicans, it still believes in God and goes to church.

A chum from BBC Wales, Mike Flynn, offers this:

"I did enjoy this programme ttp://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01kksr0 on R4 yesterday. Poet Daljit Nagra revels in the extraordinary word horde of Hobson-Jobson, the legendary dictionary of British India.

Hobson-Jobson has resulted in more English words of Indian origin entering the OED than of any other country - dinghy, bungalow and shampoo to name a few. Since its first publication in 1886, Hobson-Jobson has been continuously in print for 140 years and has amused, inspired and seduced generations of writers from Rudyard Kipling to Salman Rushdie.

Dr Kate Teltscher of Roehampton University is producing a new edition for publication later this year as part of the Oxford World Classics series and she is entranced. She says it breaks all the rules about dictionaries. It's madly scholarly yet hugely idiosyncratic and fun.

Hobson-Jobson was compiled by two extraordinary polymaths Henry Yule and Arthur Burnell, who corresponded with scholars, diplomats, missionaries, intelligence officers and army personnel across the globe to produce their 1000 page lexicon.

What brought this rant about? It was my friend Dai Woosnam who disclosed a romantic side which was unsuspected. Dai's blog harvests a wide meadow with film clips from all over the world. I did not know it had also brought him a Russian wife.

Larissa Bollcheva appeared in TV AM broadcast. She was a doctor in her home town Tver between Moscow and St Petersburg. Dai, the questing vole, saw her, was smitten and wrote to invite her to his home in Caerphilly for three weeks. As the Grand Climax the holiday ended with a proposal of marriage. They were 41, neither had been married before but against the odds the marriage has been blissfully happy.

Larissa came here with a strong belief she should give her skills and experience to the country of her choice. She still felt loyalty to the country where she was born but she had been a doctor in Russia for 18 years and believed she had paid her dues.

In Wales she took the exams which enabled her to practice medicine and moved to a small, homely Valleys hospital. Having worked in South Wales at hospitals in Swansea, Cardiff and Caerphilly, she moved to Grimsby in October 1999 to a post as Consultant Physician. She is currently Clinical Director for Medicine at the same hospital, Diana, Princess of Wales Hospital, Grimsby, North East Lincolnshire.

It took her four years to become a British citizen. When the letter came she was overjoyed. She thought of going out for a celebratory meal but that seemed inadequate. It was then she had the Great Idea. She planted a garden of 40 roses in waste land adjoining the hospital.

She explained: “It was my way of saying thanks to the UK for accepting me as a citizen. Some of the nurses say that when they walk past them every day they think of me, and I find that very moving.”

So do I which is why I say, “Bring them on”........Hoplites of Hope which enable countless thousands to enjoy the largesse of the Welfare state.

I am not an obsessive gardener. When I lived at Tattenhall on the Welsh border I had to remonstrate with an enthusiastic neighbour whose flower seeds blew over the fence and choked my weeds. At a subsequent flat on the Rows in Watergate Street, Chester, the single window box was tended by a firm of jobbing gardeners which was also responsible for the hyacinth bowl. So there is no need to warn me that lawn mowing brings on heart attacks.

More active gardeners may wish to know that it is the first cut of the season that is the unkindest cut of all and does the damage. Doctors call it lawnmower angina and I can take a hint. When my doctor said I was so far overweight the slightest exertion could kill me I acted at once. I gave up exertion.

It is the same with the first lawn-mowing of the season. That is the one I gave up. In fact I gave it up right through to November. At our first property on the Isle of Anglesey I was proud of my traditional cottage garden. You would love it. Right in the middle of my land I grew this traditional cottage; the rest was nature, red in tooth and claw.

When we moved to the big house which had a three acre garden unemployment in the village dropped to single figures. Now we have downsized to a pensioner's bungalow we have two gardeners, one kept largely for conversation, to cosset our postage stamp sized plot.

The Anglesey garden was a nature reserve for weeds until I got help. I am sure Conan Doyle had my bindweed in mind when he wrote "The Speckled Band".

I wouldn't go out after dark in case it had me by the throat and dragged me off to its lair in the ivy which was gradually dismembering the garden wall. Miss Kip, our long dog, Taz's predecessor, wouldn't go near the place. One summer she was so covered in burrs she was four times propositioned by kerb-crawling hedgehogs. And the cat was mugged by a robin. I had convolvuli that could bring down a running rabbit in its own length and dandelions that were bred from real lions. When you pulled my nettles they pulled back. Soil? I had nettle-strengthened soil so vitamin choked you could plant a seedling in the garden and by the time you reached the back door it was six foot tall and waving at you. Tendrils from my peas plucked passing pigeons out of the sky. The real trouble with gardening is that whatever you grow you always have two hundred over.

Especially lettuce. Breed like triffids and there is no sight in nature more terrifying than a lettuce gone to seed.

Mind you, I love gardens. Other people's, where someone else does the weeding and you can stretch out on a lawn without that nagging worry that it is growing so fast you are levitating and if you don't rush in for the mower you are going to have an angry giant fee-fo-fuming at you. Also you don't have to buy packets of seed which cost you more than the Indians were paid for Long Island. Can you understand it? Every year you weed away annuals that have sown themselves, every marigold has enough seeds on its stem for the deposit on a house. Yet when you buy a packet the only variety you get is King's Ransom because that is what it cost. And now we have something else to worry about. Killer tomatoes from outer space. Did you read where American schoolchildren projected 12.5 million tomato seeds into space?

After six years they came back and no sooner had they been planted in schools across America than NASA warned that their exposure to cosmic radiation meant they could be toxic. All part of an experiment, I read, to find the effect of space exposure on living tissue.

Now we know.

Lethal tomato butties. On top of which I do not understand why grown men want to float around on their backs doing unmentionable things into plastic bags just to get to the Moon.

I would almost rather go to the Costa Brava.

When the week began we had an army large enough to recapture Bradford, several suburbs of Burnley and even put a token force in Todmorden. By Wednesday we had lost a Brigade (3,500) and by next Monday I expect to see empty sentry boxes at Buckingham Palace and the Colour trooped by the Salvation Army.

An organisation called G4S, an acronym of God-forsaken which rivals in incompetence the Ministry of Defecation, was given three hundred million pounds to provide security for the Olympic Shames. This week it admitted it was terribly sorry but there had not been enough time to recruit enough men to carry out the job. The reason there had not been enough time was that they had not started recruitment earlier and the reason for that is they would have had to pay recruits for a longer time.

So 3,500 luckless service folk have been told leave is cancelled, the holidays they have booked will have to be cancelled and they are going to spend the rest of the summer as usherettes.The Argylls were paraded twice this week. To be told of their demise and the next day to be told their leave was cancelled and they were all going to the Games.

May I make a suggestion? Why not give them the money God-forsaken saved by not recruiting in time and the money they would otherwise have to pay to their staff during the games? So far they are still in profit because the Olympic oaf who drew up their contract omitted a penalty clause

Oh, and another thing. God-forsaken also runs our prisons, including one down the road from our house. I would feel a lot safer if they could hand the contract over to our redundant fighting men.

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This chap rang me up and asked if I wrote biographies for people. I said, “Only rich people” and he said, “That is OK, I am rich.”

That is how I found a dear chum Captain William Higgin.

When I got to know him better and heard something of his life, I said, “You must have spent a fortune.”

“Three to be exact,” he told me proudly.

He was one of the finest game shots of his generation. His game diaries, kept since the age of eleven, show a total of 357,000 birds and vermin destroyed. Not recorded was the Dornier bomber he shot down on his family estate at Puddington, Cheshire, or the two sacred peacocks he potted which almost got him lynched by angry villagers in India.

He shot the Dornier bomber as it came in very low on its run to the iron works at Queensferry.

He recalled; “It was quite an easy shot and the next day Western Command in Chester confirmed it had come down.”

The peacocks he shot in India, on safari, and was saved from angry tribesmen by the Head Man, a Cambridge graduate, who smuggled him out at night.

His shooting career almost ended when as a 19-year-old company commander in the 5^th Baluch (Jacob’s Rifles) Regiment, King George V’s Own, a bullet whistled past his ear on morning parade.

It had been fired by a deranged sepoy.

Bill’s dilemma was that if he reported him to the CO the sepoy would have been shot. He noticed the man was wearing a marksman’s badge and ordered another sepoy to rip it off.

He said: ‘If you missed me at that range you are clearly wearing it under false pretences.’

He felt justified when six months later the sepoy won the Military Medal.

Fighting on the North West Frontier was conducted in a gentlemanly way.

If a village became obstreperous it was given a warning that on an appointed day the Indian Air Force would bomb it. On that day, the villagers would scatter into the mountains and the Air Force would come over and drop a few bombs. Not many casualties and very little blood letting.

Posted to the Burmese jungle in World War 2, he was struck down with polio and it took ten days to get him to hospital.

He told me: “I warned my soldiers I would shoot anyone I found drinking water from a pond. Then twenty-four hours later like a bloody fool I drank from one.”

After a year in hospital, disguising his polio limp he was back on duty in India as ADC to an Army Commander, Sir Henry Finnis. Subsequently he was Pandit Nehru’s warder when Nehru was imprisoned by the British.

He remembered: ”I looked after Nehru for six months and he didn’t address a single word to me. Can’t blame him. He was kept in appalling conditions, literally in a cage built onto a shed like a dog kennel where he slept.”

After the war Bill ran three farms in Cheshire, North Wales and Shropshire, but still managed to shoot five days a week. Then two years before we met he suddenly couldn’t lift a gun. After 59 years the crippling legacy of the polio had returned. Refusing to be defeated he hired a beater to carry him on shoots and hold his shoulder whilst he shot.

The biography we wrote together “Koi Hai” was published the day he went into hospital. He died two days later, a few hours after I had presented him with his first royalty cheque, which I had framed.

His ancestors included the Restoration rakehell 2nd Duke of Buckingham who killed the Earl of Shrewsbury in a duel whilst the Countess looked on, and a Pendle Witch.

He bought Peplow Hall, near Hodnet, “the second finest house in Shropshire”. It had a church in the grounds with a congregation of six and a very fine choir of twelve. The head chorister, who was 92, used to beat for shoots. One of Bill’s guests missed a partridge and shot the chorister in the forehead. Bill thought it would be the end of the choir but a couple of weeks later he was back singing.

RIP, old chum
According to Military records, 142 Skidmores served in the Napoleonic, Boer and two world wars. Only one was an officer, another was a bandmaster, three were corporals and I was the only sergeant (in military records though just missing the war). All the rest were privates, marines and able seamen (one was press ganged in time to be killed with the other three at Trafalgar).
My own career was by a wide margin less glorious. There was me and Flookie Anderson, both Black Watch (RHR), Paddy from the King's Own Scottish Borderers and Kerr, a PFC in the 8^th USAF, and the plan we hatched in the Malcolm Club at Fassberg on the Berlin Airlift was to steal a C54 Skymaster bomber, fly it to the Eastern Zone and sell it to the Russians. Our CO Lord Langford would not have taken a forgiving view and I doubt if our long friendship could have been coaxed into blossom.

We had it all worked out to the last detail. The planes only touched down for a few minutes to be re-loaded and Flookie, who was a Hard Man, reckoned overpowering the pilot would be child’s play. We might even be able to sell the cargo of potatoes on the black market. Where the plan fell down was that none of us had the slightest idea how to fly a plane and though Kerr said it was easy we thought it better to err on the side of caution. Had we not, and been caught, we would still be in the glasshouse half a century later.

There would be Tote offices and steeple chasing on Mars if I had been caught smuggling a German boy out of the Russian Zone in Berlin on board a C54Skymaster with a cargo of potatoes. My wife still has the jewelled watch his mum gave me as a token of thanks. His step- father was less gracious. He stopped the bus which was taking me on demob to remind me I owed him ten shillings. Even the RSM who had escorted me to the bus to say farewell was shocked. And two days earlier he had put me on the charge that cost me three stripes. He said he just wanted people to know there were no hard feelings.

MARCHING ODOURS

With a characteristically bizarre perversity the BBC launched Armed Forces Week with an essay on Sunday morning attacking militarism. The Ministry of Detritus chose Armed Forces Week to inflict more casualties on those brave boys and girls than Napoleon.

The public got it right. Contributions to service charities have increased by 25 per cent. The government?????????

Crime Minister Cameron was quite sure that we should support our brave boys and girls who are giving their lives for their country. Crime Minister? He qualifies as a Capo di Tutti Capi, a Teflon Don, with his police, parliament and the bankers all corrupt. It was he who made the worthless Covenant with the Forces which is busily being broken.

Bomber Command survivors, who had to buy their own war memorial, spent Armed Forces Week scrabbling round for even more money to pay for the Opening Ceremony, to which the M (al) OD(orous) refused to contribute a penny.

In the week the Famiglia Cameron emasculated the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, the new Tartan Gurkhas (Joanna Lumley's Own), it chose Plymouth (Argyll?) to pick HMS Argyll from our few remaining warships to fire the Royal Salute in honour of that distinguished soldier the Earl of Wessex, who in turn took the salute at the parade of veterans.

Would that be the same Earl of Wessex whose military career ended so abruptly when he fled from a Royal Marines Induction course to become a tea boy for Lloyd Webber in a theatrical company? Perhaps not the most tactful choice to accept the devotion of battle hardened service men and women – including, presumably, the two whose uniform got them barred from a Coventry pub.

The Earl was in fine form. He has only two decorations, Royal Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter and Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order, both gifts from mummy.

Confronted by a soldier wearing a rainbow of campaign ribbons, he was suitably impressed: “My, we have been keeping you busy,” he gushed.

WE??????

The most shaming thing of all is that Cameron is being bested by the Gaffed Salmon, the Will Fyfe of Politics.

One of the reasons given for disbanding six regiments was the number of commonwealth and other foreigners they recruited. Yet the Yorkshire Regiment which is being disbanded is the best recruiter in the Army. Oh, that they wore  the Kilt in Pudsey tartans.

At the memorial service at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire, the Olympic Torch (a bright idea of the Nazi spin doctor Goebbels) was lit from the memorial by Corporal Johnson Beharry, the youngest soldier to win the VC.

On 1 May, 2004, Beharry was driving a Warrior Tracked Armoured Vehicle that was hit by multiple rocket propelled grenades. The platoon commander, the vehicle’s gunner and a number of other soldiers in the vehicle were injured. Beharry was forced to open his hatch to steer his vehicle, exposing his face and head to withering small arms fire. Beharry drove the crippled Warrior through the ambush, taking his own crew and leading five other Warriors to safety. He then extracted his wounded comrades from the vehicle, all the while exposed to further enemy fire.

Corporal Beharry is from Grenada, which when last I looked was in the Commonwealth. His regiment, the Princess of Wales Royal regiment which formed the Guard of Honour, is also in danger.

It is possible that a “super regiment” will be formed from the Royal Anglian Regiment, the Princess of Wales’ Royal Regiment and the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers who won 6 VCs before breakfast in Gallipoli. Proposed names are the East of England Regiment or the English Fusiliers.

A judgement of Solomon. We are relinquishing Scotland yet keeping Scottish regiments in which English soldiers have always dominated - when I was one, a CSM and three NCOs came from the same suburb of Manchester as I did - but are now replaced by Colonials. We look forward to a devolved future in which they are Commonwealth mercenaries.

The only consolation to people like me who love soldiers but loathe wars is that war has become one of those bad habits we can no longer afford. Unless the Red Peril or the Chinese Hoard, neither with any major record for foreign wars, invades Anglesey.

An Argyll friend writes:

“Although the majority in the Argylls are Jocks they believe their ethnic mix adds to their potency as a fighting force which is a credit to their officers and SNCOs. Their view is that their Fijian and West Indian and other Commonwealth soldiers wear their tam-o'-shanter with the same pride and swagger as a Para his maroon, a Marine his green or even an SAS man his sandy beret.

On top of that, before 5 Scots deployed to Afghanistan for the Operation Herrick 2010/11 tour of duty, they outscored and out performed every other battalion in 16 Air Assault Brigade - the Army's much-vaunted premier brigade - which included BOTH Para battalions, the Royal Irish and the Irish Guards. Second in marks was.......2 Scots, who you will recall in their former glory as either The Royal Highland Fusiliers or The Highland Light Infantry.

So now you can see why this rankles so badly with The Thin Red Line. “

THE STATELY HOMES

I have always had a deep sympathy for the aristocracy. I was brought up in a bright, cheerful council house with electric light and efficient plumbing. In stately homes where I have stayed the bed is sometimes damp, the plaster is usually crumbling and it is always 200 yards to the nearest lavatory - and, when you get there, you can easily find a notice saying ‘Do not pull chain’.

The inconvenience of the conveniences does not bear thinking about when you are used to a WC across the landing and at the first sign of a rebellion in the plumbing the rent man would be severely spoken to. There are exceptions. Plas Newydd, across the road from my house in Wales, was known as the most comfortable country house in Britain where every bath had its own bedroom. But just imagine getting to the top of the council house waiting list and being called with an offer of a house surrounded by trees, four miles from the nearest shop, 800 years old and a mile from the front gate.

I married above myself. All my in-laws went to very expensive public schools. The only higher education I had was fifty-six days in a military prison. However... not only was the accommodation more comfortable in the nick: the discipline was not as strict. When my wife was a four-year-old convent boarder the nuns bathed her in a sheet so that she would not be inflamed by the sight of her own body. Until she was eight she thought she ended at the neck. One of my titled friends was beaten in his pajamas so savagely by his housemaster at Marlborough that blood ran down his legs.

The other disadvantage of the Upper Classes is that they are usually rich. I have a great terror of being rich. I am very nervous every Sunday morning until the Ferret finds the lottery result in the paper and informs me we are not winners. Such a relief. I cannot imagine anything worse than a sudden rush of pound notes to the wallet. Take all the enjoyment out of life. I have lived on my wits for 83 years and I agree, with a few shining exceptions, that you can tell what God thinks about money by the sort of peopleto whom  he gives it .

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"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. " — Thomas Jefferson, 1802