TRIAL OF WELSH TEFLON MASIA M

One of the joys of  living in Wales was the pleasure I got from being rude on radio and in my columns  about the Welsh Arts Establishment or, as I christened it, The Teflon Tafia. It was  never slow to”take to the mattress  in retaliation. Over 25 years its Capo di Fruti refused me  research grants on all but one of my thirty books, hymns of glory to Wales and Welsh heroes. It did promise me a grant to research the  first book I wrote on my neighbour and friend, the painter Sir Kyffin Williams RA,  but that was twenty years ago and I am still waiting for their cheque. I could write another book listing the blows they rained. Sufficient to say they were eager signatories to the Celtic ‘Hypocritic’ oath.

It was our mutual loathing of the Teflon Tafia which cemented my friendship with Kyffin, to whom they behaved disgracefully over his whole career. He was the best painter Wales has produced and now has a gallery named after him. They called him “a disgrace to Wales” and refused his proferred gifts of  paintings. Now he is dead they praise him to the skies.

Kyffin was the kindliest of men. It was he and our landlord the Marquess of Anglesey who won me the only recognition I have ever  had: a pension marking my contribution to Welsh culture awarded by the English Royal Literary Fund, an honour I share with  Dr Johnson, the Dictionary man.

Although extremely rich – he once went out to buy a paper and came back with a new Volvo which he bought because he was attracted to its  KW licence  plate – Kyffin dressed like a tramp and had the woebegone air of a bulimic walrus. In desperation his dealer bought him new suits which by some magic immediately became old when he put them on. When he opened his mouth he could have charmed the stone statues on Easter Island.  He was a legendary story-teller. I treasure the tapes we made whilst I was writing his first book, which was not otherwise a happy experience. The result was so badly produced I wrote a second memoir when Seren, the publisher, failed to keep their promise after admitting the faults were theirs.

I was delighted when Gomer sent me “Obsessed”, written, if that is the phrase I want, by an art gallery curator John Smith and David Meredith, a former PR man for HTV. It would be kinder not to criticise the narrative which largely consists of  names, which if they all buy the book will ensure its entry into a Bestseller List. Indeed it reads like Beachcomber’s famous list of Huntingdonshire Cabmen. Unhappily it fails to bring out the lovable, witty and amusing creature that was Kyffin.

That is not sour grapes. The reproductions of his paintings and drawings are quite simply the finest I have ever seen. If Kyffin is a shadowy figure in the text, in the plates he springs gloriously to life.

I called my second memoir “The Man Who Painted in Welsh”. Kyffin was famous for his landscapes but for me it is his portraits that were his greatest achievements.  He never took longer than a morning to paint one, but they don’t just appear on his canvasses, they live and breathe. This book contains some of the best. You need not read it; the illustrations are his life and like the man himself bring joy to the heart.

I am not named but I do make a guest appearance on page 154:

“From time to time, friends would call at Pwllfanogl to find Kyffin in a worried state. On one occasion, an author whom he regarded as a friend had written about Kyffin’s family in a disparaging manner, producing a manuscript full of inaccuracies and falsehoods. Kyffin banned the publication only to find himself being pestered by the author for money, a lot of money, the final figure turning out to be even more than the sum Kyffin had originally mentioned. Friends advised Kyffin to ignore the journalist, some going as far as to advise Kyffin to tell him to jump in the lake. But Kyffin always had to put things right. Against better advice, the man was paid – but Kyffin had kept his dignity. To their credit, the publishers did not proceed with publication at the time, but to the disgust of many it appeared after Kyffin’s death.”

Not only is this monstrous and untrue. The authors knew it was. I sent Smith a copy of my second biography of Kyffin in which all my dealings with him were told as evidence of his generosity. It was Kyffin who invited me to write the book, who gave me a list of people to contact and ate many dinners as my guest after which he tape-recorded the story of his life. Any reference to his family came directly from Kyffin’s own book “Across the Straits” and our tape-recorded interviews with him and his friends whom I interviewed at length. On the strength of the first three pages that I showed him he decided he did not want the  book published. I couldn’t break my contract but I did agree that he should write to the publisher and offer to repay his costs to kill the book. The publisher refused (I still have the correspondence).

The reason the book was delayed was that I would not allow it to be published during his lifetime. He said I could do what I liked with it when he was dead. I certainly did not bother him for money. In fact I lost several thousand pounds in royalties, grants, advances and two years’ unpaid work researching and writing. It was Kyffin who raised the question of money. I have his letter offering to buy back a painting he had given me for £7,500 (it is now worth twice that). The letter can be read in my second Kyffin memoir “The Man Who painted in Welsh”.
He also saw and approved the final mss  and made corrections which I still have in my files, alterations which I gladly made but Seren, the publisher, ignored.

The implication of the words in” Obsessed” was that Kyffin was upset with me. This is rubbish. Long after the book was published he gave me, lovingly inscribed, a book of his drawings. Shortly before his death when he was unable to write I had a letter from him dictated to a friend, recalling our friendship. I also have a cartoon of the two of us dancing hand in hand which he drew to send to friends who knew the book was postponed as proof we were still friends.

inhuman beings.....

In a perfect world badgers would be culling us. We make a far greater mess of the world. We kill other species and ourselves on a scale unimaginable in the animal kingdom. The hungriest man-eating lion watches us in envy.

I am pro-badger and have been since I first read The Wind in the Willows but the cull puzzles me for other reasons.

Professor Ian Boyd, Chief Scientific Adviser, and Nigel Gibbens, Chief Veterinary Officer, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, have pointed out that bovine TB does not affect human beings and only a small proportion of the national herd is affected by it.

So why are we doing it? An EU directive demands eradication but bans the use of cattle vaccine. Rather than persuade the EU to allow cattle vaccination, the Government has ordered mass slaughter to please MPs from rural areas, who in turn protect their seats placating a minority of vociferous farmers who cannot see the cull is a PR disaster for the farming industry.

Off the coast of America there is an underwater continent of the same size. It is the collection of waste plastic which ocean currents have collected from round the world. It could be harvested and machinery exists to recycle it. But we are too busy creating another continent of scrap metal.

The world is girdled with a dense armour of scrap aluminium from derelict space rockets which could wreck satellites forecasting weather, interfere with the fuelling of mobile phones, immobilise sat navs and enable other more sinister uses.

For why? To satisfying the ill bred curiosity of scientists.

The benefits? Teflon. We can now fry eggs without burning the pan and we know there used to be rivers on Mars.

Could it be the Government? Ed Miliband proves his fitness to run the country by talking for an hour without notes. After all, similar demonstrations won leadership battles for both Cameron and Clegg. So what is the big deal? All over the planet there are wives who have been doing that for centuries.

There is one product of the scientific age without which I couldn't live. The computer family. It has replaced the television as a way of passing time until Charon knocks on the door to invite me to a river picnic. I have just spent months trying to find a tablet I could use. I have been baffled by iPads, Kindle Fire, Kindle Touch and Nexus. All went back to their makers without a nudge from Charon. Then I saw that the Apple Store in Cambridge was offering to set up iPads for buyers and the problem was solved. I joined the iPad generation.

Not all my friends approve. I knew a man once who warned his friends of a change of address by writing a letter to The Times which they could not fail to print. Another friend has all the gear but refuses even to use the room where it is housed

Laid back and leisurely, another friend, the elegant Dr Michael Senior, is the archetypal Victorian Man of Letters, attached to the 20th century for purposes of rations and accommodation only.

He lives in style in an elegant mansion on a hilltop, with views up, down and across the Conwy Estuary in North Wales. Every window a seascape. Sunday afternoons he hosts a croquet party for his friends; he farms, chairs historical societies, dines out and knowledgeably wine tastes. Even his house has a relaxed name, Bryn Eisteddfod, in English the sitting down place.

Do not be fooled. He is like the swan, relaxed on the surface but beneath going like hell. A driven man. He is a compulsive Open University degree collector, has written more than thirty books - a book a year – and published prize-winning poetry and learned articles on folklore. He paints at a furious rate, studied for his doctorate in philosophy in what he laughingly calls his spare time and gardens tirelessly. His day is planned to the minute.

Although he is primarily an historian, the author of ten unpublished novels, he began as a playwright. His first play “The Coffee Table” was broadcast on Radio 3 and in Canada and New Zealand. It had a stage production at the Toronto Playhouse. He thought he was on the threshold of a glittering career.

2Tthe Literary Advisor of the Royal Shakespeare Company rang and asked if I had any other plays. I hadn’t, but I said ‘yes’, and he asked me to send an example. The company were putting on a season of new plays at the Barbican and he thought I might be one of the chosen playwrights. I quickly wrote four or five and sent them off. They were liked but before they could be put on the company’s policy changed and they were never done. Kenneth Tynan encouraged me to write film scripts but they were never made into films.”

Heart-breaking?

“I am reconciled to that sort of thing. Being a writer is like playing the one-armed bandit. You get a trickle of luck and you think the next one is going to be the big one. The next book is always the best. It’s an addiction, like gambling.”

He has had a gambler’s luck. He toured Greece to write a book on “Greece and Its Myths”. That was the book he enjoyed most of the many. The most scholarly was his “Tales of King Arthur”, a rendering in modern English of Sir Thomas Mallory’s immortal and largely incomprehensible “Mort d’Arthur”, out of print in the UK but still a big seller in the US.

“It is the best story ever told but it gets bogged down in the detail of jousts and genealogies, essential to the medieval reader but lost on us. I wanted to make it more accessible to the ordinary reader.

“I believe the subject matter is related to Wales. Dinas Bran, for instance...”

(Castell Dinas Bran is the ruined castle, sometimes called Crow Castle or Bran's Stronghold, on a high peak overlooking the town of Llangollen and the Dee Valley.)

“Bran relates to the classic gods and there are early stories about it closely related to the Holy Grail. Bran in the Mabinogion possessed a holy vessel which I see as a grail prototype. There are several reasons to classify Dinas Bran as the Castle of the Holy Grail. For one, a Celtic scholar R.S. Looms has suggested it was the castle of the Fisher King who was traditionally the keeper of the Grail. Bran may well have been a river god. Parsifal is Percival who is also connected with the Mabinogion. British myths have been neglected and I see it as my job to bring them back to the public.”

It is a labour of love, not money. His UK and international books made money but he writes mostly for a one-man Welsh publisher, Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, which brings him a few hundred pounds a year.

“They are read and people enjoy them and that satisfies my reason for writing - to communicate. People write and phone me from all over the world to say they have enjoyed my books. That gives me a very good feeling and is really the only reward I want.”

Painting he also does for fun. “I paint four pictures a year. I am Chairman of the Friends of the Royal Cambrian Academy and we have open exhibitions which allow us to put up our paintings there, which is a great privilege. “

Another privilege is the situation of his house in the Conwy Gap.

“The Conwy Gap extends from Conwy to Deganwy. It is a sunshine trap. I can sit in my window and see it raining on Anglesey and up the valley at Rowen whilst my garden is bathed in sunshine.”

It is symbolic of a man whose life is suffused with the stuff.  

revised blog

do hate columnists who forever talk about their families... but speaking as a descendant of a sister of the Virgin Mary I am not convinced that Jesus, my celebrated cousin, was married. All I can say is, you wouldn't think it the way he goes on about peace and harmony. (Handy hint to wives: My first wife was assertive so I was obdurate; my current wife is lovable and I am as putty in her hands. Of course, I always have in mind the recent Norwegian study which has shown that divorce rates are 50 per cent higher among couples who share the housework than in those where the woman does the lion's share of the chores.) But to resume...

Frankly we have been a bit worried in The Family about the Exalted Cousin. There was that scandal about his dad being a Roman soldier...

In the 2nd century, Celsus, a pagan anti-Christian Greek philosopher, wrote that Jesus's father was a Roman soldier named Panthera. There was a revolt at Sepphoris near Nazareth around the time of Jesus' birth. The "common legionary name" Panthera could have arisen from a satirical connection between "Panther" and the Greek word "Parthenos" meaning virgin. It took two hundred years for Origen to put things right. He nailed it as a fabricated story. He stated that Christ was second to God, both in power and dignity, justice and wisdom. But as my old mum used to say, "There's no smoke without fire."

Josephus in his 1st century History of the Jews claimed there were messiahs in every market place, but went on: "About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man.  For he was one who performed surprising deeds and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Messiah. "

Josephus also said that Jesus had a brother called James (another uncle for me) so there is no reason to deny him marriage, though how he managed, as a married man, to get so many words in beats me. And did he suffer from that great domestic hazard? After a few years husbands become invisible as wives go husband-deaf.

My bookmaker Willy Birchall maintained till his dying day that a man who married twice didn't deserve the good luck of getting rid of the first one. Naturally the finding of these marriage "lines" does throw up some interesting issues. Someone says it justified the claims in Dan Smith's "da Vinci Code". Actually the idea came from an earlier book "Holy Blood and Holy Grail".

But there are lots of iffy things you hear. That business of the miracle of the five loaves and two fish feeding the 5,000. Stand on me. No Jewish mother is going to send her kid out for the day without a picnic lunch of, maybe, a flask of hot chicken soup, matzos bread and perhaps a little gefilte fish on the side.

I have always thought the Exalted Ancestor was very sound as a philosopher but a bit too fond of conjuring tricks. Though he must have been a riot at the marriage feast at Cana and I wish he had passed that trick with the wine round the family, the price of gin being what it is.

I have been married twice and the second one has been blissful. Indeed this week she saved me from being eaten alive. My first wife gave the lie to the belief that Britain never produced a decent light heavyweight fighter. She once accused me of eating in secret. I didn't mind that she was forever leaving me. What I didn't like was the way she always came back. I always try to marry above myself and my future widow, as well as saving my life, knows all about punctuation and paragraphing which has always baffled me. Wordsworth was the same. He used to get de Quincey to check his proofs.

DRAWING YOUR ATTENTION

My favourite cartoonist John Jensen has provided the covers of both my novels "Island Fling" and "The Magnificent Evan" which are coming out as E Books from Bewrite Books. He has also found time to write and draw his own book which sold out on Amazon within days of publication. Do order one, it's worth its weight in pleasure. "Figures of Speech" is for anyone who loves the English language. Unlike most books about language, however, it allows us to see the things we say. Have you ever wondered what "a passing whim" might look like? Or "a flimsy excuse", or even
“a screaming abdab"? Well here they are - along with ninety-nine others - in a work which brings to life, through witty and imaginative illustration, the curious idioms and phrases which pass our lips, without thought, every day. It is a light-hearted look at language but one designed to encourage readers and writers of all ages to pause for a moment and consider how many of the 'ordinary' things we say are, when you look again, full of absurd and extraordinary life.


NEVER ASK "HAVE YOU EATEN?" IN THE PRESENCE OF AN ESCALATOR

My life is a constant cartoon. Late on Wednesday afternoon after a substantial lunch of crab cakes and ravioli, pleasingly partnered by two pink gins and a bottle of something red and not too dry, I  found there was a special on the day's menu: Me. An Escalator tried to eat me.

One moment I was standing on a machine placidly contemplating the brawn on toast planned for supper. The next the machine had turned into a ravening beast and I was Beowulf battling Grendel. I could feel its teeth nibbling at my trousers, and having got purchase, it reared up and I was flat on my back travelling down an escalator - which was quite a trick because the escalator was going up - and the questing teeth were now nibbling my vertebrae. Worse, every anguished second brought me nearer its slavering jaws at the foot of the escalator.

I felt a quick stab of sympathy for the crab cake I had thoughtlessly chewed, then I was Bulldog Drummond, tied to a moving belt as the circular saw loomed ever nearer. I waved my stick in a menacing manner, but to no avail. I twisted and turned, but the teeth which ran all the way down its back nibbled inexorably.

Then at the last moment my Ever Loving jumped over me, pressed a red button and the gnashing teeth subsided into sulky silence. A Head Ferret magically transformed into a Heavenly Deliverer. A young Polish gentleman lifted me to my feet and helped me up this gourmandising Eiger. To say I was shaken would be putting it mildly. I felt like Smallweed, the Paralysed Usurer in "Bleak House" who constantly needs to be fluffed and set upright like a pillow.

An Indian lady bravely stepped on to the escalator and pulled me to safety. And that was not all. The red button had activated a security camera which flashed a picture to the control room and as I muttered my thanks for immigrants I was surrounded by Shopping Mall executives and first aid men. Plainly it wasn't the first time the escalator had gone berserk. There were no cogs in its innards, just a belly filled to the brim with the remains of luckless shoppers.

By now the executives had parted their ranks for two para-medics, one an Indian, who threw me off balance by asking me if I knew what day it was and did I know where I was. Although I felt aggrieved to be burdened with idle chat when I had just escaped ravening jaws I answered as civilly as I could. As it turned out they were just ensuring I wasn't concussed. I was lucky. That was the only time I have ever known what day it was without looking at a newspaper. Thank the Lord he didn't ask me to translate Magna Carta.



BE VERY AFRAID...

Drugs that don't work: a medical scandal.

It's long, detailed, and shocking!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/sep/21/drugs-industry-scandal-ben-goldacre?google_editors_picks=true

NO WONDER HE WEPT...

I do hate columnists who forever talk about their families... but speaking as a descendant of a sister

of the Virgin Mary I am not convinced that Jesus, my celebrated cousin, was married. All I can say

is, you wouldn't think it the way he goes on about peace and harmony. (Handy hint to wives: My

first wife was assertive so I was obdurate; my current wife is lovable and I am as putty in her

hands. Of course, I always have in mind the recent Norwegian study which has shown that divorce

rates are 50 per cent higher among couples who share the housework than in those where the

woman does the lion's share of the chores.) But to resume...

Frankly we have been a bit worried in The Family about the Exalted Cousin. There was that scandal

about his dad being a Roman soldier...

In the 2nd century, Celsus, a pagan anti-Christian Greek philosopher, wrote that Jesus's father was

a Roman soldier named Panthera. There was a revolt at Sepphoris near Nazareth around the time of

Jesus' birth. The "common legionary name" Panthera could have arisen from a satirical connection

between "Panther" and the Greek word "Parthenos" meaning virgin. It took two hundred years for

Origen to put things right. He nailed it as a fabricated story. He stated that Christ was second to

God, both in power and dignity, justice and wisdom. But as my old mum used to say, "There's no

smoke without fire."

Josephus in his 1st century History of the Jews claimed there were messiahs in every market place,

but went on: "About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man.

For he was one who performed surprising deeds and was a teacher of such people as accept the

truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Messiah. "

Josephus also said that Jesus had a brother called James (another uncle for me) so there is no

reason to deny him marriage, though how he managed, as a married man, to get so many words in

beats me. And did he suffer from that great domestic hazard? After a few years husbands become

invisible as wives go husband-deaf.

My bookmaker Willy Birchall maintained till his dying day that a man who married twice didn't

deserve the good luck of getting rid of the first one. Naturally the finding of these marriage "lines"

does throw up some interesting issues. Someone says it justified the claims in Dan Smith's "da Vinci

Code". Actually the idea came from an earlier book "Holy Blood and Holy Grail".

But there are lots of iffy things you hear. That business of the miracle of the five loaves and two fish

feeding the 5,000. Stand on me. No Jewish mother is going to send her kid out for the day without a

picnic lunch of, maybe, a flask of hot chicken soup, matzos bread and perhaps a little gefilte fish on

the side.

I have always thought the Exalted Ancestor was very sound as a philosopher but a bit too fond of

conjuring tricks. Though he must have been a riot at the marriage feast at Cana and I wish he had

passed that trick with the wine round the family, the price of gin being what it is.

I have been married twice and the second one has been blissful. Indeed this week she saved me

from being eaten alive. My first wife gave the lie to the belief that Britain never produced a decent

light heavyweight fighter. She once accused me of eating in secret. I didn't mind that she was

forever leaving me. What I didn't like was the way she always came back. I always try to marry

above myself and my future widow, as well as saving my life, knows all about punctuation and

paragraphing which has always baffled me. Wordsworth was the same. He used to get de Quincey to

check his proofs.

DRAWING YOUR ATTENTION

My favourite cartoonist John Jensen has provided the covers of both my novels "Island Fling" and

"The Magnificent Evan" which are coming out as E Books from Bewrite Books. He has also found

time to write and draw his own book which sold out on Amazon within days of publication. Do order

one, it's worth its weight in pleasure. "Figures of Speech" is for anyone who loves the English

language. Unlike most books about language, however, it allows us to see the things we say. Have

you ever wondered what "a passing whim" might look like? Or "a flimsy excuse", or even
“a screaming abdab"? Well here they are - along with ninety-nine others - in a work which brings to

life, through witty and imaginative illustration, the curious idioms and phrases which pass our lips,

without thought, every day. It is a light-hearted look at language but one designed to encourage

readers and writers of all ages to pause for a moment and consider how many of the 'ordinary'

things we say are, when you look again, full of absurd and extraordinary life.


NEVER ASK "HAVE YOU EATEN?" IN THE PRESENCE OF AN ESCALATOR

My life is a constant cartoon. Late on Wednesday afternoon after a substantial lunch of crab cakes

and ravioli, pleasingly partnered by two pink gins and a bottle of something red and not too dry, I

found there was a special on the day's menu: Me. An Escalator tried to eat me.

One moment I was standing on a machine placidly contemplating the brawn on toast planned for

supper. The next the machine had turned into a ravening beast and I was Beowulf battling Grendel.

I could feel its teeth nibbling at my trousers, and having got purchase, it reared up and I was flat on

my back travelling down an escalator - which was quite a trick because the escalator was going up -

and the questing teeth were now nibbling my vertebrae. Worse, every anguished second brought me

nearer its slavering jaws at the foot of the escalator.

I felt a quick stab of sympathy for the crab cake I had thoughtlessly chewed, then I was Bulldog

Drummond, tied to a moving belt as the circular saw loomed ever nearer. I waved my stick in a

menacing manner, but to no avail. I twisted and turned, but the teeth which ran all the way down

its back nibbled inexorably.

Then at the last moment my Ever Loving jumped over me, pressed a red button and the gnashing

teeth subsided into sulky silence. A Head Ferret magically transformed into a Heavenly Deliverer. A

young Polish gentleman lifted me to my feet and helped me up this gourmandising Eiger. To say I

was shaken would be putting it mildly. I felt like Smallweed, the Paralysed Usurer in "Bleak House"

who constantly needs to be fluffed and set upright like a pillow.

An Indian lady bravely stepped on to the escalator and pulled me to safety. And that was not all.

The red button had activated a security camera which flashed a picture to the control room and as I

muttered my thanks for immigrants I was surrounded by Shopping Mall executives and first aid

men. Plainly it wasn't the first time the escalator had gone berserk. There were no cogs in its

innards, just a belly filled to the brim with the remains of luckless shoppers.

By now the executives had parted their ranks for two para-medics, one an Indian, who threw me off

balance by asking me if I knew what day it was and did I know where I was. Although I felt

aggrieved to be burdened with idle chat when I had just escaped ravening jaws I answered as civilly

as I could. As it turned out they were just ensuring I wasn't concussed. I was lucky. That was the

only time I have ever known what day it was without looking at a newspaper. Thank the Lord he

didn't ask me to translate Magna Carta.



BE VERY AFRAID...

Drugs that don't work: a medical scandal.

It's long, detailed, and shocking!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/sep/21/drugs-industry-scandal-ben-goldacre?

google_editors_picks=true

KING TUT TUT

1231 words




King Tut tut


The columnal skies exploded this week as single engined "not so few" emails weaved in and out of a second Battle of Britain attacking the invading statistics I gave last week. This column is strictly neutral but this is what the official website says:

"At the start of the war, Germany had 4,000 aircraft compared to Britain's front-line strength of 1,660. By the time of the fall of France, the Luftwaffe (the German air force) had 3,000 planes based in north-west Europe alone including 1,400 bombers, 300 dive bombers, 800 single engine fighter planes and 240 twin engine fighter bombers. At the start of the battle, the Luftwaffe had 2,500 planes that were serviceable and in any normal day the Luftwaffe could put up over 1,600 planes. The RAF had 1,200 planes on the eve of the battle which included 800 Spitfires and Hurricanes - but only 660 of these were serviceable. The rate of British plane production was good - the only weakness of the RAF was the fact that they lacked sufficient trained and experienced pilots. Trained pilots had been killed in the war in France and they had not been replaced."
   
From another reader: "Not sure whether it was deliberate reader 'test' by you, but the German Berlin Games filmmaker referred to in 9/14's Thought For The Day was actually Leni Reifenstahl."

As Dr Johnson excused himself in similar circumstances, "Sheer ignorance."

I stick to my main theme. The truth is much more dramatic than fiction. Take Downtown Abbey. I am an addict, even though life in the Abbey bears no resemblance to the few stately homes I know. I do wish Julian Fellowes would take a tip or two from my chum William Cross.

In the early 20th century Highclere Castle, where Dowton is set, was the home of the fifth Earl of Carnarvon and his countess, the rapacious Almina who came with a dowry of £50 million from Baron Alfred de Rothschild, the lover of Almina's mother. Cross's first book "The Life and Secrets of Almina Carnarvon" was an eyebrow-raising account of her love life. Her lovers included her husband's best man who fathered, Cross believes, the 5th Earl. He was Prince Victor Duleep Singh, a godson of Queen Victoria and the son of the last Maharajah of Lahore. Almina (they wed in 1895) brought with her a colossal fortune, just at a time when the family coffers were almost drained. He got the money, she got a title.

If Carnarvon wasn’t interested in his new wife, ten years his junior, then his best friend - and, claims Cross, lover at Eton - was. Prince Victor practically lived at Highclere Castle in Berkshire. "He had plenty of opportunity," says Cross. Significantly, when the Countess became pregnant she made two sets of plans for the birth of her child. The first, official, plan was to have the baby delivered at the Carnarvon family home in London’s Berkeley Square. But she also rented another house - and for good reason. "She was terrified," says  Cross. "The safe house was her planned refuge - just in case the baby was born with the wrong skin pigment."

Her other lovers included at least one of her servants, an assistant gardener. She would summon him by standing in the study window.
As a new series of Downton starts Cross has published an equally frank, indeed sensational,  account, based on family diaries, of her husband: "Lordy! Tutankhamun's Patron As A Young Man". Perhaps we must now call him "Pharaoh Tut Tut".

The money the 5th Earl gave to Howard Carter to finance his hunt for the grave of Tutankhamun came from his wife, despite her suspicion the two men were lovers. Perhaps more important Cross has unearthed new evidence about the curse of the Pharaohs. The death of the 5th Earl was said to have been caused by a mosquito bite. The new evidence shows that Almina had no doubt what caused her husband's death. He caught syphilis during a continental jaunt with Victor when they were young men freshly down from University. By the time he made his last trip to Egypt the disease had reached its terminal stage. Cross has discovered errors in the death certificate.
He says: "In the rush to have Lord Carnarvon's death advanced into folklore as a result of a bite or curse those involved left clues behind  of their carelessness in an attempt to cover up the sordid truth... distractions that have completely falsified and distorted an important piece of archaeological and human history... Fiction fabricates facts for the sake of making a storyline more entertaining and dramatic. The TV dramas that uplift the lives of real people and aim to tell their stories but then exploit and distort these people's lives and try to put things over that are completely made up, thus masking the truth, are totally unacceptable and wrong."

Nevertheless Cross is not one to examine the oral hygeine of a gift horse. Not only does publication of his book chime with the launch of a second series of "Downtown Abbey": this is the 90th anniversary of the finding of the tomb of the pharaoh King Tut Tut.

Like other stately homes during the First World War, Highclere had been turned into a haven for the wounded, and Almina discovered a passion for wearing a matron’s uniform and bossing people about. After the war she was ready to try it again, this time for money. Alfred House in central London, named after Alfred de Rothschild, was likened to the Ritz Hotel. A hall porter in medals and a uniform greeted “guests” while Almina wafted round in her uniform. The trouble was she often failed to provide a bill at the end of a guest’s stay. “She thought it was bad taste,” recalled one grateful patient.

To boost her income, a new service was added to the menu at Alfred House. Though pregnancy termination remained illegal in Britain until 1967, a steady trickle of well-to-do female patients were now checking in to the nursing home. The consequence, had Almina been caught, would have been a jail term: instead high society looked the other way. The countess’s nephew by marriage, Evelyn Waugh, described it as “Almina’s abortionist parlour”.

It was not enough. Never having had to count the cost, she was now losing money at a spectacular rate. She also took a new lover, James Stocking, a heating engineer. She was nearing 70; he years younger. This choice of companion was, indeed, a final abandonment of her social position - but not the first. When her second husband died she had even taken a fancy to the young undertaker who attended his corpse. She was now, in the eyes of society, hopelessly déclassée.

And broke. “In 40 years she had used and abused every last vestige of her portfolio of investments… every asset was gone,” observes William Cross. In today’s values she had blown the equivalent of £50 million. Her son, the 6th Earl, wrote to the Inland Revenue. He called her “a scheming swindler”.  At the age of 75 the countess was declared bankrupt, largely due to the actions of her son. She moved to a terraced house in Bristol with no hot water and got by on occasional Highclere handouts. She died after choking on a piece of chicken in the early summer of 1969. She was 93. Julian Fellowes please note!

Copies of "Lordy! Tutankhamun's Patron As A Young Man" by William Cross are obtainable from bookmidden@yahoo.co.uk


A GRANDPA WRITES

"Me - 'How does it feel to be eight?'
Jacob - 'Alright, but I rather enjoyed being seven.'
He finished the Guardian cryptic crossword for me at breakfast."
Jacob awarded Judo yellow belt
(Ken Ashton)


PS From A FRIEND

"You may or may not have seen on the BBC news among others this evening that Prince Charles and Camilla visited Headley Court today to open a new extension. A source very close to me was also there and met them both and said: 'They spoke to every soldier and they made every one of them feel special. They were well over an hour beyond their schedule and they didn't appear to give a toss. They made time for everybody and, unlike politicians, they know how to speak to the young private soldiers.'

ONE FOR THE ROAD

An English pub landlord pulled a gun on customers after they tried to order drinks in Welsh, a court heard.

Gareth Sale became involved in a heated row with drinkers days after taking over the Royal Oak pub in Penrhyndeudraeth, Gwynedd.
The 26-year-old landlord allegedly produced an air rifle after taking exception at locals trying to order drinks in their native language.
Mr Sale, along with his partner who were new to the area and didn't speak Welsh, asked their customers to order drinks in English.
But when customers ordered in Welsh, Mr Sale ejected a group from the pub while brandishing an air rifle loaded with a gas canister, a jury were told.


































There were several clues relating to Toy Story, which  haven't seen and he has.

Spot the balls up

The Hillsborough scandal has followed the usual course. Quarter of a century wait for the truth;police come out badly, lawyers rub their hands as they wait for the shower of gold from a public inquiry and Jack Strawman blames it all on Lady Thatcher
.I have been out of tune with what we laughingly call Western Civilisation  since the Dawn of Denim and the advent in the Sixties of the  adenoid as a musical instrument.
One valuable lesson has stood between me and madness.
 I have never trusted  a word the Government has said.
The statistics for drunken drivers included drunken pedestrians and accidents in which drink was a presence but not necessarily the cause; the World Health Organisation despite trying unsuccesfully for five years to identify  dangers from second hand smoking, still insists they exist. They admitted that the number of safe drink units was plucked from the air. r The government has only to see a number to double it.

The Battle of Britain certainly saved us from invasion but  the gallant Few was a fiction. The RAF had several hundred more pilots than the Luftwaffe. Between June and September 1940 , we made three times as many new fighter planes. The  enemy  ran out of  aircraft and spares
 The Government  made a victory out of the shameful defeat  in France in 1940.The B.E.F left behind 475 tanks,38,000 vehicles, 12,000 motor cycles, 8,000 tephones, 1,855 wireless sets, 7,000 tons of ammunition,90,000 rifles,1,000 heavy guns,2,000 tractors, 8,00 bren guns and 400 anti tank guns. On 6 June the War Cabinet were told there were only 600,000 rifles and 12,000 Bren guns left with which to defend Britain.
In a vain attempt to persuade the French Government not to surrender the  51st Highland Division were ordered to stay behind. They  defended a twenty five mile front with only the light tanks of the Lothian Light Horse in support until forced to surrender.The Division,all volunteers 'were condemned to spend the war as slave labour in Silesian coal mines.
 Churchill was the Master of Spin. Asked how history would view Britains role in the war he replied.“ Have no fear. I will write it”
Unfortunately others were so incensed at his boasting they wrote  their own accounts .
In his diaries Field Marshall Sir Alan Brooke, his Chief of Staff wrote;
"He knows no details, has only got half the picture in his mind, talks absurdities, and makes my blood boil to listen to his nonsense. The wonder is that three quarters of the population imagine Churchill is one of the great strategistsof all time...and the other quarter have no conception what a menace he was"
The historian Noble Frankland wrote in The Spectator that Churchill  thought air support on a battlefield would add a complication without advantage; that the Germans would be unable to break the French on the Western Front; that the Japanese would be too cautious to enter the war and if theydid Singapore would remain invulnerable; neither submarines or aircraft would pose a seious threat to battleships and he sent two battleships without air cover and bnoth were sunk within a week. He did not believe in radar.He was a passionate advocate of poison gas He ordered the bombing of Dresden and then condemned it and was responsible for the disastrous Norway campaign. On the eve of victory in Europe he ordered the Chiefs of Staff to prepare a plan for an alliance with Germany to attack Russia"
Andrew Akexander in his book " America and the Imperialism of Ignorance" denies there was ever a Soviet threat. He quotes Sir Michael Howard " No serious historian any longer argues that Stalin ever had any intention of moving his forces outside the area he occupied in Eastern Europe"
In a fascinating book ""What needled Cleopatra" Phil Mason wrote of the  famous phrases, which  enshrined Churchill as a great leader. Sadly they were not original. In 1611
John Done wrote; "Tis in vain to do so or mollify it with thy tears or sweat or blood"
 In 1823 Byron wrote of "Blood,sweat and tear-wrung millions"
Others who used it were Lord Alfred douglas,d Theodore Roosevelt and Garibaldi
Churchill even admitted his plagiarism . In his History of the English Speaking Peoples he cites ".....so much owed by so many to so few" as borrowed from a contemporary innthe English Civil War " Never ran so many from so few" Sir John Moore on the seige of Calvi in the Peninsula War " Neverwas so much work done by so few"
 His friend F.E.Smith talked of "The end of the beginning."
Not even Goebells was safe. In February 1945 he wrote inDas Reich of the result of Nazi surrender;
"... An Iron Curtain would descend on this territory"
Ten days later Churchil used it in a letter and later to great acclamation in the US Senate

As a War Corresopndent in the Boer War Winston was lionised when he broke his parole and escaped from captivity by the Boers in 1899. A fellow captive Aylmer Haldane claimed that he and another prisoner had included Churchill in their joint escape plan. " He slipped off without myself or the third man, whose abuse of Churchill I shall not forget"
Winston's political career until the Thirties was a resounding disaster but it did no damage to his towering self belief. Its apogee was the Gallipoli debacle which he urged on Government to relieve a British army in a vain attempt to capture Baghdad were trapped by the Turks at Kut el Amara. Gallipoli failed with half a million casualties , the army in Kut surrendered with 10,000 casualties, the diseased starving survivors were sent on a 600 mile death march to Anatolia where the few that remained were put to work on railroad change gangsies. Neither defeat need have happened. When the Young Turks seized the Ottoman empire in 1907 they sought an Alliance with Britain.At Churchill's urging Britain turned them down.  The Turks had placed an order for two battleships with Cammel Laird.  Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty commandeered them.. In 1914 the Turks signed a pact with the Kaiser.
As Colonial Secretary in the 1920s, he unleashed the notorious Black and Tan thugs on Ireland's Catholic civilians, and when the Kurds rebelled against British rule, he said: "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes...[It] would spread a lively terror."

. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was warned by Cabinet colleagues not to appoint him to office

 When Mahatma Gandhi launched his campaign of peaceful resistance, Churchill raged that he "ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back." In 1943 a famine broke out in Bengal,  Up to 3 million people starved to death.e British officials begged Churchill to direct food supplies to the region. He bluntly refused.


He believed t Kenya should be kept for white settlers, and approved the clearing out of the local "blackamoors". ". under Churchill's post-war premiership, some 150,000 of them were forced at gunpoint into detention camps  where according to historian, Professor Caroline Elkins. . "Electric shock was widely used, as well as cigarettes and fire," she writes. "The screening teams whipped, shot, burned, and mutilated Mau Mau suspects."
Churchill invented Iraq. As  Colonial Secretary he offered Palestine to both the Jews and the Arabs –
Would we have won World War 2 without him? Probably not. He inspired the Home Front in the darkest days,he was the first to warn against the dangers of the fledgling Nazi party at a time when much of the Establishment, including Edward 8 admired Hitler and would have welcomed Nazi invasion. His personal bravery was beyond question. He expiated the Gallipoli debacle by fighting in the front line in France commanding a battalion of the Scots Guards
A close friend Lord Boothby who shared many of Churchill's "qualities" said of him " Churchill was a shit but he came at a time when we needed shits"

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
Clearly the Olympic Games ,like the rest of the poor, is always going to be with us.It has succeeded in taking  the public's mind off the appaling mess successive governments have made of our finances.It has justified the billions spent on Nazi inspired imagery. The Olympic village, the torch ceremony,even theOlympic circles archeologists "found" on a cave in Greece were put there by Lotte Reineger and used as a symbol in the film she made of the Berlin Games.
I suggest an innovation without a shady past
. For four years lottery money has been poured into the training of athletes to ensure that most gold medasls went to the teams from wealthy countries.Poorer countries weere nowhere.
 Should not the money be put into a joint fund and shared with the poorer countries? That would have been the manifestation of the true Olympic Spirit of which everyone could be proud to share.