Here I sit, a contented hen, clucking to myself and watching with pride as my chickens scatter over the farmyard that is the media. Trailing their clouds of glory. Newspaper editors, news editors, war correspondents and dazzling columnists all spent their egg days under my watchful eye.
None more distinguished than John Edwards who ranged the world for the Daily Mail and who is still in retirement spinning round the planet like a restless top.
The Daily Wail is a very odd newspaper. I usually wake at five and immediately reach for the lap top to download Mail Online. Not for its personality. It is the most spiteful tabloid. Never happier than when gleefully photographing the cellulite of ageing pop stars and actresses. Endlessly making your flesh creep. The Express has its Crusader: the Mail should carry Dickens' Fat Boy. Looking on the bright side is anathema to that mournful assembly of type. Nevertheless, I read it. It has the best stable of columnists of any daily newspaper.
This week it struck a rare happy note. No need to worry about Global Warming. We are within a frog's leap of the End of he World.
The Mayans, it assures us, calculated that a lunar month - the period between successive new moons - lasted 29.5305 days, just 34 seconds away from its actual length. Their Calendar ends abruptly on December 21, 2012.
Not only the Mayans. Michael Drosnin, in his book “The Bible Code”, claims to have found encoded biblical descriptions of the Earth being pounded by comets in the year 2012.
Lawrence Joseph, author of “Apocalypse 2012”, claims gravitational and energy forces operate from the centre of the milky way. If disrupted, they would throw our bodies and our planet out of kilter, resulting in catastrophe.
This theory is debunked by David Morrison of NASA,.who also refutes a popular internet theory that worldwide devastation will be caused by Earth’s magnetic polarity suddenly changing and throwing its direction of rotation into reverse. He says: ‘The magnetic polarity does change every few hundred thousand years and the last time was about 400,000 years ago, but there is no evidence to suggest that it will happen again any time soon.'
It would at least prove that God ,the driving cause, is a woman.
David Morrison also dismisses the idea that a mysterious planet known as Nibiru is heading towards Earth at an alarming rate.
“If this thing really was only three years away from hitting Earth, it would be the brightest thing in the sky apart from the sun and the moon,’ he says. ‘It would have been tracked by thousands of amateur and professional astronomers all over the world. You just can’t hide a planet.’
The last planet that beat up on us 65 million years ago wiped out the dinosaurs.
That is as maybe. But it happened. Ask a dinosaur.
Searches of the cosmos up to 100 years into the future by NASA’s Near Earth Object Program led to them reporting that there are no serious threats in the offing and, even if a sizeable projectile did hit us, it might not wipe us out altogether.
‘There would be global firestorms and severe acid rain,’ says Don Yeomans, manager of the programme. ‘But all of these effects are relatively short-term, so the most adaptable species, like cockroaches and humans, would be likely to survive.’
That is no doubt what they told the dinosaurs.
There isn't a lot of comfort in the reassurance by Bill McGuire, Professor of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College London, that we are 12 times more likely to experience the explosion of a super-volcano. He defined that as an eruption that expels 1,000 cubic kilometres or more of debris, enough to obliterate an area the size of Yorkshire.
Keep your eye on Yellowstone Volcano in Wyoming. It could explode with the force of 1,000 Hiroshima bombs and plunge the planet into a nuclear winter.
‘There would be great clouds of sulphur gas that would mix with the water in the atmosphere to form a veil over the Earth, cutting out sunlight and dramatically cooling the Earth’s surface,’ says Professor McGuire. ‘A super-volcano probably wouldn’t kill all of us, but there would be a devastating impact on our global economy and society.’
Try as I may, I get very little assurance from that.Though I suppose cockroaches
are laughing up their wing cases.
Scientists agree we are not immortal. Diminishing supplies of hydrogen in the sun, as in all ageing stars, will cause it to swell up and engulf us before collapsing in on itself and becoming a ‘white dwarf’.
The good news is that this is unlikely to happen for another four billion years or so. And since none of the other aforementioned fates is likely to befall us for a very long time to come, if at all, we are probably safe to get on with our Christmas plans for 2012.
We cannot be too complacent about mankind’s longevity, however.
The Earth’s magnetic field - crucial for deflecting solar radiation and channelling it into belts that harmlessly circle the planet - will diminish to the point where it can no longer protect us from the sun’s rays. This would lead to an epidemic of cancers and a major disruption of the food chain.
Compasses would stop working, animals would be unable to find their way back to breeding grounds, and the weather would become less predictable. The Earth would become unstable, unleashing a series of natural disasters.
When the Daily Mail puts the frighteners in, it doesn't mess about.
Nor is it without its believers. Years ago it claimed that the Scots were descended from an Egyptian pharaoh's daughter. Muhammad Fayed had obviously brooded over this for some time. This week he bought himself a kilt and made a bid to be King of Scotland. Fayed King of Scotland and Blair President of Europe?
Let us pray the Mayans were right.
I am told that the biggest TV audience watches “Strictly Come Dancing” and the X Factor and that Simon Cowell, that curious little man with a perma-tan doing his best to live up to his hair-do, has made a fortune thinking them up.
Thinking them up? I have been avoiding amateur contests like them since Ralph Reader did his appalling Gang Show. Parroted by Carol Levis, Hughie Green. Name me a monster and I will give you a talent contest. Pubs have been doing them for years. And while we are talking TV, what is the point of having such state of the art technology as Freeview and Fetch if you only use it to repeat programmes ad nauseam? The BBC is getting rid of many of its top executives. Not enough.
AN OLD FRIEND CALLS
Ken Ashton emails:
My grandson, Jacob is five.
Each Friday, they are given a book to take home for their Mum to read to them and make comment.
This week's book is a paperback novel about pirates and the intro reads...
'Yo-ho, me hearties, let's get into town, drink some rum, crack a few 'eds, scour the brothels and what if we catch crotch pox?'
....
The author Michael Cox says in his website;
'... working as a trainee spiv, encyclopaedia salesman, whippet wrangler and rose grower, Michael became a teacher, using his spare moments to write stories, paint pictures and hide inside other people's imaginations. He enjoys visiting schools.'
Which reminds me. A new X Ray machine planned for airport security shows naked bodies and concealed bombs. Fears of paedophilia mean it cannot be used on children. They will be examined by the old method. Running hands over their bodies.
Saturday, 31 October 2009
Saturday, 24 October 2009
A WORLD WITHOUT PORPOISe ROUND BLACKPOOL TOWER
So that's it then. It's official The Ice Cap will have melted in a decade. Our Prime Sinister only gave us five days but, as usual, though he may have made the world safe for marauding banks, he was wrong.
All the same, that's me hunting for a 3XXX wet suit and joining the porpoises swimming round the top of Blackpool Tower.
Hold your foot up. This melting of the ice caps which is going to cause the waters to rise and drown us all...........................................????? I am not trying to do a Canute, but when the ice turns to water, won't the water just take the place that used to be filled by ice? So the level will hardly rise at all, surely?
I am told that if the ice were to melt away completely the oceans would rise no further that the volume in a glass of gin-and-tonic to which a lump of ice had been added. Believe me, I have done the research. The level in the glass does not rise perceptibly when the cubes have melted away.
Global warning is attractive to governments. Lots of new laws, making us even easier to control, and no one living today will ever know whether they were right or wrong. Scientists who support the theory get $4 billion in grants. Carbon trading brings in $2-3 trillion a year. Yet two prominent oceanographers, David B. Ericson and Goesta Wollin, estimate: “A new theory to explain continental glaciations has been published for every year that has passed since the first recognition of the evidence for past glaciation."
The EU promises to save the world with wind turbines. OK if the wind is blowing, but a lot of the time it isn’t. Solar cells are fine if the sun is shining, except that a lot of the time it isn’t, especially at night. Tidal systems work where there is a suitable coastal feature, but there aren’t many. Bio-fuels? The country’s entire grain crop would be needed to power our road transport.
Many scientists dismiss wind farms as government subsidies and have demonstrated that energy consumed in building thousands of new solar cell factories would create a long term warming debt. Cells convert less than twelve per cent of the sun's rays into electricity. The rest is re-radiated as heat, contributing to global warming. Professor Ian Plimer, the Australian geologist whose new book Heaven And Earth: Global Warming — the Missing Science Quartet (£25), shows that ‘anthropogenic global warming’ is a dangerous, ruinously expensive fiction, a ‘first-world luxury’ with no basis in scientific fact.
He says polar ice has been present on earth for less than 20 per cent of geological time; extinctions of life are normal; climate changes are cyclical and random; the CO2 in the atmosphere - to which human activity contributes the tiniest fraction - is only 0.001 per cent of the total CO2 held in the oceans, surface rocks, air, soils and life; CO2 is not a pollutant but a plant food; the earth’s warmer periods - such as when the Romans grew grapes and citrus trees as far north as Hadrian’s Wall - were times of wealth and plenty.
Climate IS changing. That is what climate does. The most persistent myths are the drowned kingdoms round the UK, the drowned city Atlanta and the Great Flood. Years ago I interviewed a scientist at the Marine Science Laboratory at the University of Wales. His team operated a giant drill which excavated samples of the earth's core. They found evidence of a world-wide flood. An academic chum of mine conducting an underwater survey of the Gwynedd coast discovered outlines of dwellings far out to sea. The Vikings farmed in Greenland; the Chinese sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 - and there was little ice at the North Pole.
Worryingly, eight peer-reviewed studies, significantly supporting roles in global warnings, are fraudulent. Rings from twelve trees at the Yamal peninsula in Siberia were used to ‘reconstruct’ past temperatures. They indicated pronounced and dramatic uptick in temperatures. A wider test of trees from the Peninsula showed no dramatic recent warming. Perversely, the Yamal peninsula contains the biggest field of gas reserves on the planet which will release millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and, on the peninsula itself, pose a grave threat to the Nenets reindeer herders and their ancient way of life. That won't be a consideration. Gazprom, Russia's state energy giant, says there is nearly 38 trillion cubic metres on the peninsula and in adjacent offshore fields – enough to supply Europe for several decades. Putin invited international energy companies to become partners in extracting Yamal's gas reserves, hinting at vast profits from what is now the world's biggest energy project.
Happily, studies of Victorian mariners' logs show man-made greenhouse gases are having less impact than many scientists claim. Since there were no marine chronometers until the 19th century, ships' captains needed to log very accurate weather details, including wind speed and direction, in order to gauge their longitude. HMS Dorothea's 1818 ship’s log gives the earliest account of weather in the Norwegian Arctic and shows the summer of 1818 was not markedly colder than was typical in the late 20th century.
That doesn't mean we can stop worrying. The logs helped to prove the effect on the climate of volcanic eruptions. Several captains observed a decline in temperature in 1816, which became known as the year without a summer. The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 sent so much sun reflecting sulphur into the atmosphere that global temperatures dipped the following year, with snow reported in June in New York State.
The most compelling evidence for the prosecution in the Giant Weather Hoax comes from Nathan Myhrvold, who researched quantum cosmology research with Stephen Hawking, founded the Microsoft Research laboratory and of whom Bill Gates said, “I don't know anyone who is smarter.” He says the global warming rhetoric is exaggerated.
His view is shared by the physist Lowell Wood. Myhrvold's academic tutor and a protégé of Edward Teller, Wood works for the US government, various universities and the Star Wars missile defence system. He insists climate models being used cannot even do giant storms. He claims, that although sea levels rose by 425 feet in the last 12,000 years, the bulk of the rise was in the first thousand years. In the past century the rise has been less than eight feet.
Myrhrvold agrees: “In the Seventies there was a global panic that the earth was cooling. The trend began to reverse when we cleaned the air. Most of the global warming is due to good stewardship.” He pointed out the carbon dioxide level 80 million years ago was at least 1,000 parts per million, which is the regulation standard inside new energy-efficient office buildings.
Ken Caldeira, one of the most respected climate scientists in the world who runs an ecology lab at Stamford University, agrees that human activity is responsible for some global warming but maintains that carbon dioxide is not the cause. A doubling of carbon dioxide traps less than two per cent of the radiation emitted from the earth.
The three scientists, part financed by Bill Gates, run a company called Intellectual Ventures Inc., an invention company in which scientists and puzzle solvers dream up solutions and take out 500 patents every year. Their solution? Those ships' logs showed that volcanoes affected climate by sending sulphur dioxide into the tropesphere; 34 gallons per minute of sulphur dioxide in water was enough to cool the climate. Ventures Inc. plan to pump 34 gallons of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere per minute through a multi-nozzled,18 miles long, 2 inch hosepipe. Stratospheric prevailing winds of 100 mph would wrap the vapour round the earth in twenty minutes. The system could be working in two years at a cost of £20 million, with annual operating costs of about ten million. They have even picked the site. The oil sands in Alberta have mountains of waste sulphur for which no use can be found. Myhrvold says: “Sulphur would be burned into sulphur dioxide and then liquified. With one corner of a sulphur mountain we could solve the whole global warming problem for the northern hemisphere.”
Sounds bizarre but infinitely preferable to coating the countryside with windmills of the mindless.
Fossil Fuels pay for Wahhabi-ism. We buy oil; they stash weapons to use against us. The West supplies weapons and bribes Saudi princes to buy them. It is like Saladin sending his scimitar round to Richard One's tent to get it sharpened on the Royal Grindstone.
********************* *********************** ***************** *******
RUNNETH OVER
Bizarre tragedy struck the Detroit Marathon last Sunday when three men died within16 minutes. Daniel Langdon, 36, collapsed at 9.02am local time between the 11- and 12-mile markers; Rick Brown, 65, fell in the same area at 9.17am; and a minute later 26-year-old Jon Fenlon collapsed just after finishing the half-marathon. Naturally I am anti both marathon running and jogging. Hipkin, our eighty year old gardener, cannot understand me. He has bought himself a skipping rope, which he uses every chance he gets.
I warned him that Jim Fixx, the man credited with turning a continent on to physical fitness in the 1970s, keeled over and died while on a four-mile run at the age of 52. Fixx took up running in the 1960s when he weighed 220pounds. When he died in 1984, he was down to 159 pounds. Bob Hughes, the Australian art critic, penned the following in ten minutes after being challenged to write his epitaph:
The Glutton gross in paunch and thigh
Eludes the Reaper Grim.
Swollen of nose and pink of eye,
The drunkard laughs at him
The chair-bound Journalist, the Don,
Carelessly quaff champagne,
The Pop Star lives forever, on
Pills, Bimbos and cocaine.
Frustrated by this doleful news,
Death newer victims picks,
He laces on his jogging shoes
And catches up with FIXX.
Another canard of our sorry times is that obesity kills. I am 80 and eight stone over weight and, although it's tried pretty hard, it still hasn't killed me. If I am dead by the time you read this, the argument still stands, with the added bonus that I will miss the Olympic Games and won't worry about this notice on the wall at a March Old People's Home: “Be kind to your kids. They are the ones who will choose your nursing home.”
A COURTLY GESTURE
A man who slapped a police horse across the face claimed it had stood on his foot. Christopher Taylor swore at mounted policeman PC Adam Pearson and police horse Sawley – telling him and his "ugly" horse to go away. Taylor, 26, of Anderson Street, Blackpool, admitted being drunk and disorderly.
QUESTIONABLE TIME
A young articulate black man in the audience and a Muslim Peer on the panel were agreed there should be a cap on immigration, yet they criticised Griffin's ethnic stance. The panel prated on about freedom of speech at the same time as they questioned his right to be on the programme.
I cannot conceive of joining or supporting the BNP but, once invited, he should have been given a courteous hearing. As it was, the whole programme was devoted to bashing one of the guests, a bashing in which the supposedly impartial chairman joined. I have long thought the programme would be improved by a competent chairman but the BBC uses nepotism as a substitute for racism.
(the letter The Guardian rejected)
All the same, that's me hunting for a 3XXX wet suit and joining the porpoises swimming round the top of Blackpool Tower.
Hold your foot up. This melting of the ice caps which is going to cause the waters to rise and drown us all...........................................????? I am not trying to do a Canute, but when the ice turns to water, won't the water just take the place that used to be filled by ice? So the level will hardly rise at all, surely?
I am told that if the ice were to melt away completely the oceans would rise no further that the volume in a glass of gin-and-tonic to which a lump of ice had been added. Believe me, I have done the research. The level in the glass does not rise perceptibly when the cubes have melted away.
Global warning is attractive to governments. Lots of new laws, making us even easier to control, and no one living today will ever know whether they were right or wrong. Scientists who support the theory get $4 billion in grants. Carbon trading brings in $2-3 trillion a year. Yet two prominent oceanographers, David B. Ericson and Goesta Wollin, estimate: “A new theory to explain continental glaciations has been published for every year that has passed since the first recognition of the evidence for past glaciation."
The EU promises to save the world with wind turbines. OK if the wind is blowing, but a lot of the time it isn’t. Solar cells are fine if the sun is shining, except that a lot of the time it isn’t, especially at night. Tidal systems work where there is a suitable coastal feature, but there aren’t many. Bio-fuels? The country’s entire grain crop would be needed to power our road transport.
Many scientists dismiss wind farms as government subsidies and have demonstrated that energy consumed in building thousands of new solar cell factories would create a long term warming debt. Cells convert less than twelve per cent of the sun's rays into electricity. The rest is re-radiated as heat, contributing to global warming. Professor Ian Plimer, the Australian geologist whose new book Heaven And Earth: Global Warming — the Missing Science Quartet (£25), shows that ‘anthropogenic global warming’ is a dangerous, ruinously expensive fiction, a ‘first-world luxury’ with no basis in scientific fact.
He says polar ice has been present on earth for less than 20 per cent of geological time; extinctions of life are normal; climate changes are cyclical and random; the CO2 in the atmosphere - to which human activity contributes the tiniest fraction - is only 0.001 per cent of the total CO2 held in the oceans, surface rocks, air, soils and life; CO2 is not a pollutant but a plant food; the earth’s warmer periods - such as when the Romans grew grapes and citrus trees as far north as Hadrian’s Wall - were times of wealth and plenty.
Climate IS changing. That is what climate does. The most persistent myths are the drowned kingdoms round the UK, the drowned city Atlanta and the Great Flood. Years ago I interviewed a scientist at the Marine Science Laboratory at the University of Wales. His team operated a giant drill which excavated samples of the earth's core. They found evidence of a world-wide flood. An academic chum of mine conducting an underwater survey of the Gwynedd coast discovered outlines of dwellings far out to sea. The Vikings farmed in Greenland; the Chinese sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 - and there was little ice at the North Pole.
Worryingly, eight peer-reviewed studies, significantly supporting roles in global warnings, are fraudulent. Rings from twelve trees at the Yamal peninsula in Siberia were used to ‘reconstruct’ past temperatures. They indicated pronounced and dramatic uptick in temperatures. A wider test of trees from the Peninsula showed no dramatic recent warming. Perversely, the Yamal peninsula contains the biggest field of gas reserves on the planet which will release millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and, on the peninsula itself, pose a grave threat to the Nenets reindeer herders and their ancient way of life. That won't be a consideration. Gazprom, Russia's state energy giant, says there is nearly 38 trillion cubic metres on the peninsula and in adjacent offshore fields – enough to supply Europe for several decades. Putin invited international energy companies to become partners in extracting Yamal's gas reserves, hinting at vast profits from what is now the world's biggest energy project.
Happily, studies of Victorian mariners' logs show man-made greenhouse gases are having less impact than many scientists claim. Since there were no marine chronometers until the 19th century, ships' captains needed to log very accurate weather details, including wind speed and direction, in order to gauge their longitude. HMS Dorothea's 1818 ship’s log gives the earliest account of weather in the Norwegian Arctic and shows the summer of 1818 was not markedly colder than was typical in the late 20th century.
That doesn't mean we can stop worrying. The logs helped to prove the effect on the climate of volcanic eruptions. Several captains observed a decline in temperature in 1816, which became known as the year without a summer. The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 sent so much sun reflecting sulphur into the atmosphere that global temperatures dipped the following year, with snow reported in June in New York State.
The most compelling evidence for the prosecution in the Giant Weather Hoax comes from Nathan Myhrvold, who researched quantum cosmology research with Stephen Hawking, founded the Microsoft Research laboratory and of whom Bill Gates said, “I don't know anyone who is smarter.” He says the global warming rhetoric is exaggerated.
His view is shared by the physist Lowell Wood. Myhrvold's academic tutor and a protégé of Edward Teller, Wood works for the US government, various universities and the Star Wars missile defence system. He insists climate models being used cannot even do giant storms. He claims, that although sea levels rose by 425 feet in the last 12,000 years, the bulk of the rise was in the first thousand years. In the past century the rise has been less than eight feet.
Myrhrvold agrees: “In the Seventies there was a global panic that the earth was cooling. The trend began to reverse when we cleaned the air. Most of the global warming is due to good stewardship.” He pointed out the carbon dioxide level 80 million years ago was at least 1,000 parts per million, which is the regulation standard inside new energy-efficient office buildings.
Ken Caldeira, one of the most respected climate scientists in the world who runs an ecology lab at Stamford University, agrees that human activity is responsible for some global warming but maintains that carbon dioxide is not the cause. A doubling of carbon dioxide traps less than two per cent of the radiation emitted from the earth.
The three scientists, part financed by Bill Gates, run a company called Intellectual Ventures Inc., an invention company in which scientists and puzzle solvers dream up solutions and take out 500 patents every year. Their solution? Those ships' logs showed that volcanoes affected climate by sending sulphur dioxide into the tropesphere; 34 gallons per minute of sulphur dioxide in water was enough to cool the climate. Ventures Inc. plan to pump 34 gallons of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere per minute through a multi-nozzled,18 miles long, 2 inch hosepipe. Stratospheric prevailing winds of 100 mph would wrap the vapour round the earth in twenty minutes. The system could be working in two years at a cost of £20 million, with annual operating costs of about ten million. They have even picked the site. The oil sands in Alberta have mountains of waste sulphur for which no use can be found. Myhrvold says: “Sulphur would be burned into sulphur dioxide and then liquified. With one corner of a sulphur mountain we could solve the whole global warming problem for the northern hemisphere.”
Sounds bizarre but infinitely preferable to coating the countryside with windmills of the mindless.
Fossil Fuels pay for Wahhabi-ism. We buy oil; they stash weapons to use against us. The West supplies weapons and bribes Saudi princes to buy them. It is like Saladin sending his scimitar round to Richard One's tent to get it sharpened on the Royal Grindstone.
********************* *********************** ***************** *******
RUNNETH OVER
Bizarre tragedy struck the Detroit Marathon last Sunday when three men died within16 minutes. Daniel Langdon, 36, collapsed at 9.02am local time between the 11- and 12-mile markers; Rick Brown, 65, fell in the same area at 9.17am; and a minute later 26-year-old Jon Fenlon collapsed just after finishing the half-marathon. Naturally I am anti both marathon running and jogging. Hipkin, our eighty year old gardener, cannot understand me. He has bought himself a skipping rope, which he uses every chance he gets.
I warned him that Jim Fixx, the man credited with turning a continent on to physical fitness in the 1970s, keeled over and died while on a four-mile run at the age of 52. Fixx took up running in the 1960s when he weighed 220pounds. When he died in 1984, he was down to 159 pounds. Bob Hughes, the Australian art critic, penned the following in ten minutes after being challenged to write his epitaph:
The Glutton gross in paunch and thigh
Eludes the Reaper Grim.
Swollen of nose and pink of eye,
The drunkard laughs at him
The chair-bound Journalist, the Don,
Carelessly quaff champagne,
The Pop Star lives forever, on
Pills, Bimbos and cocaine.
Frustrated by this doleful news,
Death newer victims picks,
He laces on his jogging shoes
And catches up with FIXX.
Another canard of our sorry times is that obesity kills. I am 80 and eight stone over weight and, although it's tried pretty hard, it still hasn't killed me. If I am dead by the time you read this, the argument still stands, with the added bonus that I will miss the Olympic Games and won't worry about this notice on the wall at a March Old People's Home: “Be kind to your kids. They are the ones who will choose your nursing home.”
A COURTLY GESTURE
A man who slapped a police horse across the face claimed it had stood on his foot. Christopher Taylor swore at mounted policeman PC Adam Pearson and police horse Sawley – telling him and his "ugly" horse to go away. Taylor, 26, of Anderson Street, Blackpool, admitted being drunk and disorderly.
QUESTIONABLE TIME
A young articulate black man in the audience and a Muslim Peer on the panel were agreed there should be a cap on immigration, yet they criticised Griffin's ethnic stance. The panel prated on about freedom of speech at the same time as they questioned his right to be on the programme.
I cannot conceive of joining or supporting the BNP but, once invited, he should have been given a courteous hearing. As it was, the whole programme was devoted to bashing one of the guests, a bashing in which the supposedly impartial chairman joined. I have long thought the programme would be improved by a competent chairman but the BBC uses nepotism as a substitute for racism.
(the letter The Guardian rejected)
Saturday, 17 October 2009
They're Under Allah's Orders
It has nothing to do with me. I am an aspiring Zen Buddhist and we take a very relaxed view on the God business. But if we are wrong and there is a meddlesome Supreme Being, my money is on Allah by a neck, with Mohammed a close second.
Look at the full SP.
One of the first outsiders to visit the Muslim Holy Cities was a shipwrecked cabin boy called Joseph Pitts. In 1679 he wrote: “I profess I could not chuse but to admire to see these poor creatures so extraordinarily devout and affectionate, when they were about these superstitions, and with what awe and trembling they were possessed...............”
By the 19th century you couldn't put the odds on paper for a Muslim win. An early Arabist John Lewis Burckhardt visited Mecca and Medina in 1814 disguised as a member of the Mamluk corps. He was shocked by what he saw in the Holy Mosque.
“The Kaaba is rendered the scene of such indecency and criminal acts as can not with propriety be more particularly noticed. They are not only practiced with impunity, but, it may be said, almost publicly; and my own indignation has often been excited on witnessing abominations which called forth from other passing spectators nothing more than a laugh............”
Wisely the owner looked for another trainer. He found a lawyer called Muhammad 'Abd al-Wahab
who decided that all knowledge not based on the Koran and traditions of the Prophet was false. He tried to introduce his training methods in his home town 'Uyainah and was kicked out. The neighbouring town.Dar'ihay welcomed him with open arms. Its mayor, Muhammad ibn Saud, hired him for the House of Sa'ud Racing Stables and promised to make his training methods compulsory among other stables in the neighbourhood. His stable boys took the new system so seriously they called themselves the Wahhabi Boys.
They were trained as street fighters and sent to spread the doctrine by wiping out the opposition. That was the cradle of the super-rich stable, Saudi Arabia.
In 1818 the Wahhabi- trained stable boys even went to war with Egypt and only narrowly lost.
To compensate, Allah gave them oil as an undercover bribe and they never looked back.
Where was the West when all his was happening? Usually picking the wrong horse with breathtaking skill, unfailingly backing losers and acting as though it was taking part in a not very good amateur production of The Desert Song.
In 1918 the racing world was rocked by a scandal at The Peace to End All Peace Trophy meeting at Versailles. The meeting was meant to celebrate the end of the war. After a cabal in a railway carriage, an English and Welsh gambling syndicate took a commission from Arabia for an each way bet on a cert, Arab Kingdom. In fact they put the money on the secret favourite in the overnight declaration, Grab it For Us.
Shady figures, all of them with form - “Taffy” Lloyd Geoge, “Slimey” Bill Sykes and “Fingers” Picot - were convicted of rigging the verdict after a Stewards' Enquiry. They tried to make amends by leasing kingdom franchises to Sharif Hussein and Ibn Saud. But this was wrecked when another gambler “Doc” Balfour introduced a ringer called “Israel”, racing under American colours. His riding instructions to the jockey were uncompromising: “For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country…The four great powers are committed to Zionism, and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”
The future of the Race under Muslim dominance has seen many changes. Wahhabi rules apply at most major stables and there has been a sad change in the Home of Racing, Saudi Arabia.
Death on a Haj or pilgrimage is the End most consummately to be wished for. In earlier times pilgrims had to rely on disasters, whores, disease, pillaging and murder by the Desert Arabs who controlled the Pilgrim routes. Those routes have ben replaced by four lane highways. Speed and the unpredictably bizarre oriental driving skills render the entry into paradise and the sixteen raisins, the award for dying, easier to achieve.
In his book “Armies in the Sand”, a masterly account of the rise of the Wahhabi, the American Arabist John Sabini writes:
“(The Holy City) now offers reception centres, guides, accommodation and medical services. To perform these tasks it uses the most advanced techniques of radio, telephone, closed circuit television, helicopters, anti-biotics, cameras, computers and the silicon chip......At first the Wahhabi Imams opposed these innovations as the work of heretics and the devil....by having the Quaran read on the first radio broadcast from the kingdom they became convinced the innovations were good if they were done in the service of Allah. But the Saudi Government still enforces the moral standards of its Unitarian origins. Tobacco and music are now permitted, but alcohol, prostitution and unseemly dress are forbidden.”
Puzzlingly these restrictions do not seem to apply to owners when they are racing abroad.
++ ++ ++ ++ ++
The great joy in our lives is our old gardener Hipkin. He is the quintessential Fenman and a keen observer of his neighbours. This week he excelled himself. I wish you could hear his brogue, which, alas, is dying in the Fen towns in favour of Estuary English.
“Now,” he said, “Ahm goin to tell e somthin. This woman what I work for she sez to me, she says, 'Ahm gooin on oliday tomorrer and I dunno know weer to hide me money.' And er usband, he says, 'Ah'll bury it in't gardin an I'll stick a twig in so we'll know weer it is.' So that's what they do and they goes away.
“And what happened next day is along comes their son with his rotavator and rotavates the whole garden. And his machine chews up the stick. Took em a week to find the tin.”
Hipkin is seriously rich yet at 80 he delivers papers every morning and two afternoons. He tends twenty gardens, for many of which he makes no charge. We pay him but he refuses to take more than £8 for a shift that lasts at least four hours. His great joy is to take his partner Miss Beart to “Skeggie” (Skegness) where he plays bingo and always wins. He always takes to bingo his sagacious terrier called Bailey, who can count. “I says to 'im in the mornings, how many sausages d'you want for your breakfast and he goos 'Wuff, wuff, wuff'.”
Bailey has three meals a day of whatever Hipkin is eating. When they are going to Skeggie he gets very excited the night before because somehow he knows.
Miss Beart has seven rabbits which she keeps in seven hutches because she don't want no baby rabbits and Bailey likes nothing better than to go to their shed where he sits for hours looking at them adoringly. Hipkin adores Miss Beart who is 19 carat all through. He came one morning with a stone dog ornament which he wanted us to give a home. He explained: “Miss Beart cannot abear to look out of the window and see it sitting there in the cold.”
BE VERY AFRAID
Report in The Guardian
“The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.
Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.
The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.
The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.”
Wiser councils prevailed but it is worrying the way the wind is blowing
MPs are up in arms because they might have to pay back massive sums they wheedled out of taxpayers. They want to keep it on the grounds they were claiming the money within the rules. They made the rules. Isn't that like a burglar legalising burglary?
Jacqui Smith apologised to Parliament for wrongfully claiming £110,000 and that is OK. Her agent claims she will be re-elected despite that because she is a good MP. It would be interesting to hear what you have to do to be a bad one.
I have voted in every election for 38 years. What you have just read are the reasons I will never vote again.
A YORKER
I will bet you didn't know Sean Bean puts Yorkshire Relish on his fish n' chips. He wouldn't if he lived round here. As I am sure you know, Yorkshire Relish is essential on Bloaters, which have just come into season.
I tried FOUR supermarkets. There was a battalion of Thai Relish, more Indian Relish than you could shake a stick at, gallons of Soya sauce, Chinese relish, Spanish Relish.
Yorkshire Relish? Not only do our supermarkets not stock it:neither the managers nor their staffs have ever heard of it. And there is Sean Sharp fighting and bleeding for us with his riflemen in the Spanish Peninsula. Is this how the nation shows its gratitude?
Look at the full SP.
One of the first outsiders to visit the Muslim Holy Cities was a shipwrecked cabin boy called Joseph Pitts. In 1679 he wrote: “I profess I could not chuse but to admire to see these poor creatures so extraordinarily devout and affectionate, when they were about these superstitions, and with what awe and trembling they were possessed...............”
By the 19th century you couldn't put the odds on paper for a Muslim win. An early Arabist John Lewis Burckhardt visited Mecca and Medina in 1814 disguised as a member of the Mamluk corps. He was shocked by what he saw in the Holy Mosque.
“The Kaaba is rendered the scene of such indecency and criminal acts as can not with propriety be more particularly noticed. They are not only practiced with impunity, but, it may be said, almost publicly; and my own indignation has often been excited on witnessing abominations which called forth from other passing spectators nothing more than a laugh............”
Wisely the owner looked for another trainer. He found a lawyer called Muhammad 'Abd al-Wahab
who decided that all knowledge not based on the Koran and traditions of the Prophet was false. He tried to introduce his training methods in his home town 'Uyainah and was kicked out. The neighbouring town.Dar'ihay welcomed him with open arms. Its mayor, Muhammad ibn Saud, hired him for the House of Sa'ud Racing Stables and promised to make his training methods compulsory among other stables in the neighbourhood. His stable boys took the new system so seriously they called themselves the Wahhabi Boys.
They were trained as street fighters and sent to spread the doctrine by wiping out the opposition. That was the cradle of the super-rich stable, Saudi Arabia.
In 1818 the Wahhabi- trained stable boys even went to war with Egypt and only narrowly lost.
To compensate, Allah gave them oil as an undercover bribe and they never looked back.
Where was the West when all his was happening? Usually picking the wrong horse with breathtaking skill, unfailingly backing losers and acting as though it was taking part in a not very good amateur production of The Desert Song.
In 1918 the racing world was rocked by a scandal at The Peace to End All Peace Trophy meeting at Versailles. The meeting was meant to celebrate the end of the war. After a cabal in a railway carriage, an English and Welsh gambling syndicate took a commission from Arabia for an each way bet on a cert, Arab Kingdom. In fact they put the money on the secret favourite in the overnight declaration, Grab it For Us.
Shady figures, all of them with form - “Taffy” Lloyd Geoge, “Slimey” Bill Sykes and “Fingers” Picot - were convicted of rigging the verdict after a Stewards' Enquiry. They tried to make amends by leasing kingdom franchises to Sharif Hussein and Ibn Saud. But this was wrecked when another gambler “Doc” Balfour introduced a ringer called “Israel”, racing under American colours. His riding instructions to the jockey were uncompromising: “For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country…The four great powers are committed to Zionism, and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”
The future of the Race under Muslim dominance has seen many changes. Wahhabi rules apply at most major stables and there has been a sad change in the Home of Racing, Saudi Arabia.
Death on a Haj or pilgrimage is the End most consummately to be wished for. In earlier times pilgrims had to rely on disasters, whores, disease, pillaging and murder by the Desert Arabs who controlled the Pilgrim routes. Those routes have ben replaced by four lane highways. Speed and the unpredictably bizarre oriental driving skills render the entry into paradise and the sixteen raisins, the award for dying, easier to achieve.
In his book “Armies in the Sand”, a masterly account of the rise of the Wahhabi, the American Arabist John Sabini writes:
“(The Holy City) now offers reception centres, guides, accommodation and medical services. To perform these tasks it uses the most advanced techniques of radio, telephone, closed circuit television, helicopters, anti-biotics, cameras, computers and the silicon chip......At first the Wahhabi Imams opposed these innovations as the work of heretics and the devil....by having the Quaran read on the first radio broadcast from the kingdom they became convinced the innovations were good if they were done in the service of Allah. But the Saudi Government still enforces the moral standards of its Unitarian origins. Tobacco and music are now permitted, but alcohol, prostitution and unseemly dress are forbidden.”
Puzzlingly these restrictions do not seem to apply to owners when they are racing abroad.
++ ++ ++ ++ ++
The great joy in our lives is our old gardener Hipkin. He is the quintessential Fenman and a keen observer of his neighbours. This week he excelled himself. I wish you could hear his brogue, which, alas, is dying in the Fen towns in favour of Estuary English.
“Now,” he said, “Ahm goin to tell e somthin. This woman what I work for she sez to me, she says, 'Ahm gooin on oliday tomorrer and I dunno know weer to hide me money.' And er usband, he says, 'Ah'll bury it in't gardin an I'll stick a twig in so we'll know weer it is.' So that's what they do and they goes away.
“And what happened next day is along comes their son with his rotavator and rotavates the whole garden. And his machine chews up the stick. Took em a week to find the tin.”
Hipkin is seriously rich yet at 80 he delivers papers every morning and two afternoons. He tends twenty gardens, for many of which he makes no charge. We pay him but he refuses to take more than £8 for a shift that lasts at least four hours. His great joy is to take his partner Miss Beart to “Skeggie” (Skegness) where he plays bingo and always wins. He always takes to bingo his sagacious terrier called Bailey, who can count. “I says to 'im in the mornings, how many sausages d'you want for your breakfast and he goos 'Wuff, wuff, wuff'.”
Bailey has three meals a day of whatever Hipkin is eating. When they are going to Skeggie he gets very excited the night before because somehow he knows.
Miss Beart has seven rabbits which she keeps in seven hutches because she don't want no baby rabbits and Bailey likes nothing better than to go to their shed where he sits for hours looking at them adoringly. Hipkin adores Miss Beart who is 19 carat all through. He came one morning with a stone dog ornament which he wanted us to give a home. He explained: “Miss Beart cannot abear to look out of the window and see it sitting there in the cold.”
BE VERY AFRAID
Report in The Guardian
“The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.
Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.
The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.
The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.”
Wiser councils prevailed but it is worrying the way the wind is blowing
MPs are up in arms because they might have to pay back massive sums they wheedled out of taxpayers. They want to keep it on the grounds they were claiming the money within the rules. They made the rules. Isn't that like a burglar legalising burglary?
Jacqui Smith apologised to Parliament for wrongfully claiming £110,000 and that is OK. Her agent claims she will be re-elected despite that because she is a good MP. It would be interesting to hear what you have to do to be a bad one.
I have voted in every election for 38 years. What you have just read are the reasons I will never vote again.
A YORKER
I will bet you didn't know Sean Bean puts Yorkshire Relish on his fish n' chips. He wouldn't if he lived round here. As I am sure you know, Yorkshire Relish is essential on Bloaters, which have just come into season.
I tried FOUR supermarkets. There was a battalion of Thai Relish, more Indian Relish than you could shake a stick at, gallons of Soya sauce, Chinese relish, Spanish Relish.
Yorkshire Relish? Not only do our supermarkets not stock it:neither the managers nor their staffs have ever heard of it. And there is Sean Sharp fighting and bleeding for us with his riflemen in the Spanish Peninsula. Is this how the nation shows its gratitude?
Saturday, 10 October 2009
Celebrittle and Jockabites
Broadcasting in my day in Wales was largely dynastic. The jobs of the fathers were visited on the sons and daughters. Creativity was not a job specification. When these sprigs from an old twig wanted a new programme they sent Wynford Vaughan Thomas round the country on a horse. That is not to say he did not turn in listenable programmes. Although one of the most brilliant conversationalists I have met, Wynford was also a good listener and he loved people.
Sadly, today's celebrities have not fully mastered thinking, and their purpose as they go whirling round the globe is to be loved by the people they meet. ng, and their purpose as they go whirling round the globe is to be loved by the people they meet.
I did my first published interview on VE Day in 1945. For the next half century scarcely a day passed when I didn’t do one for radio,TV, newspapers. My books are extended interviews with people or research into their lives.
It it took me forty years to become an interviewer. I fell asleep in the middle of an interview for a Radio 4 series. For the first and only time in my life the office was inundated with letters praising my interviewing technique. At last, they all said, an interviewer who isn’t for ever interrupting. I can take a hint.
Received radio wisdom is that answers should be kept short. Otherwise listeners get bored. Rubbish. Interview questions are spurs in the flank of monologues. The interviewer is the jockey - a sort of horseman of the puckered lip. If you can see him, even in your mind's eye, he has failed.
On Radio Wales Vincent Kane was a superlative interviewer. He left space for answers. So did a man called Gerry Monte; and Michael Parkinson and quirky Ray Gosling on the other networks..
. Now the interviewer is the star. His questions swirl like a matador's red cape as he taunts the bull in a suit of too bright lights. I do sometimes wish they could fall asleep and give the other chap a chance.
We don't get interviews. We get cross talk acts between John Humphrys and various elephantine politicians; even crosser talk acts between Paxman’s eyebrows and more politicians. But they never seem to elicit any information. Worst of all Martha Carney whose idea of questioning has unhappy echoes of the Nag.
Are the broadcast media right to concentrate almost exclusively on politics? I know it is cheap but I don't know anyone who listens enthralled. Perhaps I am also wrong in believing that interviewing should not be part of the entertainment industry, which it plainly is.
Wynford Vaughan Thomas was a scholar, an historian with an inquiring mind. That is not one of the requirements of celebrity. Rather the opposite. For them, self love and personal promotion are vital ingredients. Thus we are invited to watch the Arctic gasping with amazement at the antics of Billy Connolly; America may never get over its admiration for Stephen Fry and Griff Rhys Jones cannot see a mountain or the side of skyscraper without scaling them. Michael Palin shows us the world sharing his admiration for himself. Programming is a perpetual procession of personality.
It need not be so. Kate Humble, happily shed of Bill Oddity, has allowed us to share her fascination with the Frankincense Trail. Though I wish “Autumn Watch” was not conducted in such a state of adolescent excitement. Michael White all to rarely illuminates ancient history. Hardly a celebrity, but a peerless broadcaster. There are others. Libby Purves, Eddie Maer, Ed Storton, Melvyn Bragg are masters of the craft, Neil Oliver, the pantomimic Scotsman, overflowing with hair and eagerness, who endlessly circles The Coast is not without charm. The agreeably waspish Brian Sewell has a powerful presence which he released on the Grand Tour but held in check when extolling the beauty and the people he found on the way. That may be a clue. For me the peerless presenter is the architect Kevin McCloud. Where he alights he illuminates. His joy in architecture is manifest. Other presenters of music, history and painting programmes share this obsession with their subject and scorn to rival it. Even a monumentally unpleasant person like Starkey, so vain he has said publicly he would like to be thought of as the 21st century Dr Johnson, subordinates himself to his subject.
But surely the ultimate proof that a week is a long time in radio came with the news that Radcliffe and Maconie , not, as I had thought, a brand of piquant sauce but a comedic duo, are to do their next shows whilst walking Hadrian's Wall If you cannot hear the jokes, that will be the noise the spectre of Hadrian makes as he follows them demolishing his Wall. Oh, Hadrian, after you with the shovel.
Not even death brings relief. I read that several years after his demise, Fred Dibnah, a chap who, had I stood next to him a pub, I would have moved to another bar, is once again going to tour the engineering marvels of England. Including, one assumes, reincarnation.
DIY quizzes and news bulletins fill our days. I would have thought that if satellite news bulletins and the barely live Five proved anything, they prove there isn’t enough news about - or news they can afford to get - to nourish a rolling news coverage. The reason the first popular papers included features is there wasn’t enough news to fill a paper big enough for people to buy. BBC announcers would sometimes come on, announce the nine o'clock news and say, “There is no news today. Goodnight.“
Isn’t news just another fix, anyway? We are used to getting it at stated times like the six o'clock Martini. We think we can't do without it. For the past twelve years we have been ruled by the New Jockobites. There have been log jams on what Dr Johnson memorably called the High Road that leads to England made by a Tartan Horde of BBC presenters. Some take the High Road, some take the Low Road, but they all get to the microphone before us Saxons. As if that were not bad enough, they are all suffering from the delusion that party politics are interesting. Not Politics. Gossip.
Even more depressing, we are now copying the Oompah Whimpering show where you manufacture news by bringing together stage villains or antagonists and inviting them to fight whilst the audience boos and cheers. And Oh, for a Muse of Fire that would ascend the heavens and burn up the Archers, a haven for the most unpleasant community ever assembled in the history of mankind.
ALL THE NEWS THAT IS UNFIT TO PRINT
In the Guardian Alexander Chancellor mocks Cameron for hiding the fact that he is a toff and used to shoot pheasants. Any shooter will tell you that a pheasant which sells for £2 in the game dealer's costs owners £24 in food, care and housing. If I can eat pheasant - and do every winter weekend -for £2 I can only sing “thank heaven for little boys" who are fool enough to subsidise my Sunday lunch with £22. Perhaps they would also consider shooting bread and butter pudding?
Cameron hides his hunting past because, if he didn't, rich upper class writers like Chancellor - who modestly hides the fact he is a toff, the son of a baronet and Lady Sylvia Paget, and who was educated at Eton and Trinity Hall - would criticise him for hunting. By implication, he is criticised for not hunting. Makes him sound like a pheasant, potted whatever he does. I have no brief for Cameron, Tony Blair in a top hat, but so long as he isn't Scotch I do not care who is the next prime minister.
Blair was among our war-mongering politicians who attended a service to Commemorate the Iraqi invasion and the 127 servicemen whose deaths they brought about. The Archbishop of Canterbury made his distaste plain as did the father of a dead soldier .
A service of apology would have been in better taste. Not only to the families of the dead soldiers. What about the thousands of American troops and the 100,000 Iraqis who died and would have been alive today had Hussein been left in power until his own people rempved him?
On R4 a news editor defended his decision to play in a news magazine the tape of the last minutes of three helicopter pilots who died as their chopper crashed. There have been few protests. Very few in comparison to the hundreds who complained about the broadcasting gigolo who joshed his partner for looking like a “Paki”. Even more joined in when Bruce Forsyth said that thirty years ago it would not have been noticed and anyway the Diggers called us “Limeys” and “Poms” when we were fighting side by side. In France in the Middle Ages the English were called “Rosbiffs” and rather liked it. What of “Scouser” and “Tike” and “Jock” and “Taffy” “Fenny” and “Gog” and “Hontu”, “Paddy””Kipper Basher”
A man with the mind of boy who is a victim of Asperges disease is fighting extradition to the US where he faces sixty years in gaol for what was essentially an ill-advised schoolboy prank, searching for UFOs. His last hope was our brand new Supreme Court. He has been told his case was not important enough.
But as so often, it was the Yanks (whoops, sorry, the Americans), including African Americans and Native Americans, who scooped the pool. They discover space travel and the first practical use they make of the Moon? They bomb it into the cosmic equivalent of the Stone Age. On the day their President won the Nobel Peace Prize. Perhaps not as bizarre as it appears. Nobel was an arms manufacturer who has been responsible for the death of millions.
Sadly, today's celebrities have not fully mastered thinking, and their purpose as they go whirling round the globe is to be loved by the people they meet. ng, and their purpose as they go whirling round the globe is to be loved by the people they meet.
I did my first published interview on VE Day in 1945. For the next half century scarcely a day passed when I didn’t do one for radio,TV, newspapers. My books are extended interviews with people or research into their lives.
It it took me forty years to become an interviewer. I fell asleep in the middle of an interview for a Radio 4 series. For the first and only time in my life the office was inundated with letters praising my interviewing technique. At last, they all said, an interviewer who isn’t for ever interrupting. I can take a hint.
Received radio wisdom is that answers should be kept short. Otherwise listeners get bored. Rubbish. Interview questions are spurs in the flank of monologues. The interviewer is the jockey - a sort of horseman of the puckered lip. If you can see him, even in your mind's eye, he has failed.
On Radio Wales Vincent Kane was a superlative interviewer. He left space for answers. So did a man called Gerry Monte; and Michael Parkinson and quirky Ray Gosling on the other networks..
. Now the interviewer is the star. His questions swirl like a matador's red cape as he taunts the bull in a suit of too bright lights. I do sometimes wish they could fall asleep and give the other chap a chance.
We don't get interviews. We get cross talk acts between John Humphrys and various elephantine politicians; even crosser talk acts between Paxman’s eyebrows and more politicians. But they never seem to elicit any information. Worst of all Martha Carney whose idea of questioning has unhappy echoes of the Nag.
Are the broadcast media right to concentrate almost exclusively on politics? I know it is cheap but I don't know anyone who listens enthralled. Perhaps I am also wrong in believing that interviewing should not be part of the entertainment industry, which it plainly is.
Wynford Vaughan Thomas was a scholar, an historian with an inquiring mind. That is not one of the requirements of celebrity. Rather the opposite. For them, self love and personal promotion are vital ingredients. Thus we are invited to watch the Arctic gasping with amazement at the antics of Billy Connolly; America may never get over its admiration for Stephen Fry and Griff Rhys Jones cannot see a mountain or the side of skyscraper without scaling them. Michael Palin shows us the world sharing his admiration for himself. Programming is a perpetual procession of personality.
It need not be so. Kate Humble, happily shed of Bill Oddity, has allowed us to share her fascination with the Frankincense Trail. Though I wish “Autumn Watch” was not conducted in such a state of adolescent excitement. Michael White all to rarely illuminates ancient history. Hardly a celebrity, but a peerless broadcaster. There are others. Libby Purves, Eddie Maer, Ed Storton, Melvyn Bragg are masters of the craft, Neil Oliver, the pantomimic Scotsman, overflowing with hair and eagerness, who endlessly circles The Coast is not without charm. The agreeably waspish Brian Sewell has a powerful presence which he released on the Grand Tour but held in check when extolling the beauty and the people he found on the way. That may be a clue. For me the peerless presenter is the architect Kevin McCloud. Where he alights he illuminates. His joy in architecture is manifest. Other presenters of music, history and painting programmes share this obsession with their subject and scorn to rival it. Even a monumentally unpleasant person like Starkey, so vain he has said publicly he would like to be thought of as the 21st century Dr Johnson, subordinates himself to his subject.
But surely the ultimate proof that a week is a long time in radio came with the news that Radcliffe and Maconie , not, as I had thought, a brand of piquant sauce but a comedic duo, are to do their next shows whilst walking Hadrian's Wall If you cannot hear the jokes, that will be the noise the spectre of Hadrian makes as he follows them demolishing his Wall. Oh, Hadrian, after you with the shovel.
Not even death brings relief. I read that several years after his demise, Fred Dibnah, a chap who, had I stood next to him a pub, I would have moved to another bar, is once again going to tour the engineering marvels of England. Including, one assumes, reincarnation.
DIY quizzes and news bulletins fill our days. I would have thought that if satellite news bulletins and the barely live Five proved anything, they prove there isn’t enough news about - or news they can afford to get - to nourish a rolling news coverage. The reason the first popular papers included features is there wasn’t enough news to fill a paper big enough for people to buy. BBC announcers would sometimes come on, announce the nine o'clock news and say, “There is no news today. Goodnight.“
Isn’t news just another fix, anyway? We are used to getting it at stated times like the six o'clock Martini. We think we can't do without it. For the past twelve years we have been ruled by the New Jockobites. There have been log jams on what Dr Johnson memorably called the High Road that leads to England made by a Tartan Horde of BBC presenters. Some take the High Road, some take the Low Road, but they all get to the microphone before us Saxons. As if that were not bad enough, they are all suffering from the delusion that party politics are interesting. Not Politics. Gossip.
Even more depressing, we are now copying the Oompah Whimpering show where you manufacture news by bringing together stage villains or antagonists and inviting them to fight whilst the audience boos and cheers. And Oh, for a Muse of Fire that would ascend the heavens and burn up the Archers, a haven for the most unpleasant community ever assembled in the history of mankind.
ALL THE NEWS THAT IS UNFIT TO PRINT
In the Guardian Alexander Chancellor mocks Cameron for hiding the fact that he is a toff and used to shoot pheasants. Any shooter will tell you that a pheasant which sells for £2 in the game dealer's costs owners £24 in food, care and housing. If I can eat pheasant - and do every winter weekend -for £2 I can only sing “thank heaven for little boys" who are fool enough to subsidise my Sunday lunch with £22. Perhaps they would also consider shooting bread and butter pudding?
Cameron hides his hunting past because, if he didn't, rich upper class writers like Chancellor - who modestly hides the fact he is a toff, the son of a baronet and Lady Sylvia Paget, and who was educated at Eton and Trinity Hall - would criticise him for hunting. By implication, he is criticised for not hunting. Makes him sound like a pheasant, potted whatever he does. I have no brief for Cameron, Tony Blair in a top hat, but so long as he isn't Scotch I do not care who is the next prime minister.
Blair was among our war-mongering politicians who attended a service to Commemorate the Iraqi invasion and the 127 servicemen whose deaths they brought about. The Archbishop of Canterbury made his distaste plain as did the father of a dead soldier .
A service of apology would have been in better taste. Not only to the families of the dead soldiers. What about the thousands of American troops and the 100,000 Iraqis who died and would have been alive today had Hussein been left in power until his own people rempved him?
On R4 a news editor defended his decision to play in a news magazine the tape of the last minutes of three helicopter pilots who died as their chopper crashed. There have been few protests. Very few in comparison to the hundreds who complained about the broadcasting gigolo who joshed his partner for looking like a “Paki”. Even more joined in when Bruce Forsyth said that thirty years ago it would not have been noticed and anyway the Diggers called us “Limeys” and “Poms” when we were fighting side by side. In France in the Middle Ages the English were called “Rosbiffs” and rather liked it. What of “Scouser” and “Tike” and “Jock” and “Taffy” “Fenny” and “Gog” and “Hontu”, “Paddy””Kipper Basher”
A man with the mind of boy who is a victim of Asperges disease is fighting extradition to the US where he faces sixty years in gaol for what was essentially an ill-advised schoolboy prank, searching for UFOs. His last hope was our brand new Supreme Court. He has been told his case was not important enough.
But as so often, it was the Yanks (whoops, sorry, the Americans), including African Americans and Native Americans, who scooped the pool. They discover space travel and the first practical use they make of the Moon? They bomb it into the cosmic equivalent of the Stone Age. On the day their President won the Nobel Peace Prize. Perhaps not as bizarre as it appears. Nobel was an arms manufacturer who has been responsible for the death of millions.
Friday, 2 October 2009
Senility has many joys, even though the medicinal evening Martini meets with disapproval from the Ferret.
Do try it. Four lumps of ice, pour over vodka to the count of ten, add a two-inch slice of twisted lemon peel and two drops of dry Martini. It is a recipe for which I am indebted to my friend Brian Hitchen who got it from a Mafia New York Capo de Tutti Capo who was godfather to his son. I count to twenty because I am usually very thirsty.
I also enjoy the pre- lunch toddle and delight in realising the only people who are worried about my weight are my future ex-wife and the poor devils who are going to be ranging themselves round the coffin handles. The funeral is sorted. No service but a Gathering of the Chums. My barbecue will be preceded by the Peterborough Pipe Band, which has at least one very fine piper, playing “The Flowers of the Forest “and “The Black Bear”.
When I am suitably crisp, there will be a boozy lunch at The Griffin whilst I get ready to be born again, hopefully not on a Delhi pavement.
I have little in common with this world to which I have been attached for rations and accommodation. Oddly enough, the things I will miss,family apart and they usually are, will be my constant companion Gormless, my Teddy bear, my computer and my walking sticks. assembled in tribute to Jogglebury Crowdey, one of R.S. Surtees' most lovable characters. “A fat estimable gentleman who devoted himself to the administration of the Poor Law, the propagation of his species and the manufacture of fancy headed walking sticks. Of children he had 12 with the prospect of more, to each of whom, he flattered himself, if he could leave a sufficiency of sticks he would make them independent.”
My Surtees and the rest of my books have given me so much pleasure that I would like to think of them going to a good home. The obvious solution seemed to be to sell them on Ebay.
I took down James Hogg's “Jacobite Relics”, a collection of the songs of the adherents to the House of Stuart. I loathe Bonnie Prince Charlie, a Polish wife beater who wrecked the Highlands. Anyone with doubts should read “The Private Passions of Bonnie Prince Charlie” by Hugh Douglas. But Hogg's collection of Jacobite lyrics and the Whig responses are superb. I learn that “Scotland the Brave”, the march of the Highland Division to which we former members must traditionally stand to attention, was a Whig ballad. Sadly, we assisted Butcher Cumberland, the hero of God Save the King, in his slaughter.
Hogg, a writer, was a farmer's son. He was dogged by the label “ The Ettrick Shepherd“ given to him by a writer in an Edinburgh satirical magazine.
Next my Allan Ramsay collection. A wigmaker by trade, he started the world's first lending library. He wrote poems in both English and Lalland, the argot of Edinburgh. His poetry salutes his friends who included aristocrats and bawds, topers all. His son was the eponymous painter to whom he wrote:
“With glowing colours thou canst show
Th' embroidered coat and nice toupee;
Draw him a firstrate blazing beau
Easy and airy, gay and free.
“But I can place him on a light
That will his higher merit show
Display what makes him much more bright
His courage. Learning and his wit.”
He is, so far as I know, the only poet who wrote an anacreon to an orange, or indeed one “On a slate falling on Mrs M's breast”. He wrote odes to Edinburgh's bawds and panegyrics to the aristocracy. He summed himself up in the preface to his Collected Poems: “'Tis none of the least of my diversions to see one part of the world laughing at the other, yet all seem fully satisfied with their own opinion and abilities; but I shall never quarrel with any man whose temper is the reverse of mine, and enters not in the same pleasures. 'Tis as ridiculous for one to be disobliged at another's way of thinking as it is to challenge him for having a nose out of shape with his.”
His son was a magnificent portrait painter. Our late Cousin John, whose estate is to be sold at Christie's next year, had several Ramsay paintings. If I can buy one I will die happy but I fear they will be beyond my purse.
The most valuable book I have is Burton's ”Anatomy of Melancholy”, which Dr Johnson said was his favourite book and the only book that got him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise. Burton was a 17th century Oxford scholar, astronomer and mathematician, and the last man to be able to say he had read every book in the world. I have had my copy for forty years and still haven't finished it. He published under the name of Democritus Junior, a philosopher who was “a waspish old man, very melancholy by nature, averse from company in his latter days and much given to solitariness.” He promised to “dissipate you in jests, pulverise you into salt and sacrifice you to the God of Mirth” and warns: "Yet one caution let me give by the way to my present or future reader, who is actually melancholy, that he read not the symptoms or prognostics in the following tract, lest by applying that which he reads to himself, aggravating, appropriating things generally spoken to his own person (as melancholy men for the most part do), he trouble or hurt himself, and get in conclusion more harm than good."
As I riffled through it, I had a pleasant surprise. I found a caricature of me in my youth by another dazzling talent, my great friend Jack Stoneley, who could draw nearly as well as he could write.
Thomas Warton, the Poet Laureate, wrote of “Melancholy” in 1785: “The author's variety of learning, his quotations from rare and curious books, his pedantry sparkling with rude wit and shapeless elegance ... have rendered it a repertory of amusement and information."
Michel de Montaigne, the inventor of the essay, is my favourite human being. He wrote about himself because he said that was the only subject on which he was an expert.
“The Autobiography”, which Lowenthal, an American scholar, produced, is apparently an oxymoron. In fact, Lowenthal has collected everything Montaigne wrote in his letters, travel journals and essays to assemble using the witty Frenchman's own words to create this marvel of a book.I first came across it as a schoolboy in our village library, in the far off days when libaris still had books. The new multi milllion pound library in Cambridge has far more space than it has bookshelves
Boswell's Life of Johnson is another favourite but I much prefer the doctor's Collected Works which once saved me from going mad. His prose is like crystal water, liquid, clear and flowing. In his journal “To The Western Islands” he explains in great detail how Scottish windows differ from the English variety. Then adds:
“These diminutive observations seem to take away something from the dignity of writing, and are therefore never communicated but with hesitation, and a little fear of abasement and contempt. But it must be remembered that life consists not of a series of illustrious actions or elegant enjoyments, the greater part of our life passes in compliance with necessities.”
Thanks to Boswell, Johnson has come down to us as a boor. He was nothing of the kind. At night, walking the silent streets, if he came across an urchin sleeping in a doorway, without wakening him, he would slip a coin into his hand. Wakening, they would think they had been visited by an angel.
In a way they had.
I was lucky enough to find the collected works of the Rev Sydney Smith, who founded the Edinburgh Review, He wrote to an unhappy friend, Lady Morpeth, these suggestions. They are as sound now as they were almost 200 years ago.
“1st. Live as well as you dare. 2nd. Go into the shower-bath with a small quantity of water at a temperature low enough to give you a slight sensation of cold, 75 or 80 degrees. 3rd. Amusing books. 4th. Short views of human life—not further than dinner or tea. 5th. Be as busy as you can. 6th. See as much as you can of those friends who respect and like you.
7th. And of those acquaintances who amuse you. 8th. Make no secret of low spirits to your friends, but talk of them freely—they are always worse for dignified concealment. 9th. Attend to the effects tea and coffee produce upon you. 10th. Compare your lot with that of other people. 11th. Don’t expect too much from human life—a sorry business at the best.
12th. Avoid poetry, dramatic representations (except comedy), music, serious novels, melancholy, sentimental people, and everything likely to excite feeling or emotion, not ending in active benevolence. 13th. Do good, and endeavour to please everybody of every degree. 14th. Be as much as you can in the open air without fatigue. 15th. Make the room where you commonly sit gay and pleasant. 16th. Struggle by little and little against idleness. 17th. Don’t be too severe upon yourself, or underrate yourself, but do yourself justice. 18th. Keep good blazing fires.
My treasured books have all been written by lovable scholars. None more so than a Norwich doctor, Sir Thomas Browne, who wrote “The Religion of a Doctor“. The book tries to reconcile science and religion. It was placed on the Papal Index because of its unorthodox religious speculations.
Goodness knows what the Pope would make of “Sum” which I am reading now. Very short stories about the Afterlife by a scientist David Eagleman where heaven is variously a place where one is judged by one's credit card ratings, in age groups or where you are forced to live with annoying versions of what you could have been. On a recent radio programme he described his religion as Possibilianism. He claims our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion. A third position, agnosticism, is often an uninteresting stance in which a person simply questions whether his traditional religious fiction (say, a man with a beard on a cloud) is true or not true. But with Possibilianism, he says, “I'm hoping to define a new position -- one that emphasizes the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities. Possibilianism is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind; it is not interested in committing to any particular story."
Browne and Eagleman would have got on like a house on fire. Browne was knighted by accident when the Mayor of Norwich refused the honour. He invented many of the words we use today. His “Enquiries into Common and Vulgar Errors “ is my favourite. It includes the beliefs that an elephant has no knees and thus can only sleep leaning against a tree. The best way of catching them is to saw down the tree.
In the 17th century he prophesied America would become the economic equal of Europe: “That is, when America shall be so well peopled, civilized and divided into Kingdoms, they are likely to have so little regard of their Originals, as to acknowledge no subjection unto them: they may also have a distinct commerce between themselves, or but independently with those of Europe, and may hostilely and pyratically assault them, even as the Greek and Roman Colonies after a long time dealt with their Original Countries.”
Three history books are essential. Merry gossipy Herodotus, David Fromkin's masterly analysis of Versailles and its attendant follies “A Peace to End All Peace” and the “Armies of the Sand” by John Sabini which tells of the war between Egypt and the Wahabi in the early 19th century over the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina..Important I believe because they explain the collective suicide of Western civilisation
There are so many favourites on my shelves. My “Winnie the Pooh”, “Wind in the Willows”, my collection of Old Bill cartoons, the facsimiles of medieval Books of Hours and the “Tournaments of King Rene”, a magnificently illustrated book of rules of jousting.
It is no use. E-Bay is out. I had a blind friend who continued to collect books because their presence comforted her. I know how she feels. To paraphrase the childhood prayer, there may or may not be angels round my death bed. If there are, they will be sitting on a wall of books.
Saturday, 26 September 2009
IN PRAISE OF WALES
I am a Fenman now. Although it is a land without scape and, as Bill Bryson said, if you stand on a chair in Cambridgeshire you can see Suffolk, it has been a grand place in which to be old. The “Fennie” may be seen by outsiders as phlegmatic, even aboriginal. That is not true.
When in another life I was Welsh, it annoyed me that the Welsh were seen as narrow- minded chapel-goers, in suits made from the battered covers of old prayer books. The enmity between North and South is virulent. Gwyn Thomas, a South Walian, said of the Northerners: “Their idea of gaiety is a purple spotted shroud.”
That is neither true nor kind. Rene Cutforth was nearer the mark: “Mediterranean in the rain.” Certainly that is true of the 'gwerin', the working men and women I knew when I lived on Anglesey. It was the faux middle class who invented nationalism, largely to ring fence the good jobs on offer.
The working class are witty, funny, generous and respect scholarship. It would never occur to them to think of creative writing, as the English do, as a hobby. The Welsh peasants are quick witted and wildly generous. An eminent psychiatrist Dafydd Alun Jones once pointed out to me that 'spree' is a Welsh word (sbri in Welsh). It describes the actions of God-fearing farmers who disappear for days of revelry. Only getting home in time for Sunday chapel.
He said the reason his countrymen had so many religious revivals was that their eagerness to debauch was forever leading them to the edge of the Pit, from which the revivals dragged them back.
My mates were people like Hughie Bugail who was our village policeman. Well, that is what the Chief Constable thought. Bugail means shepherd and Hughie's main occupation was policing the flock of pedigree sheep he kept on Malltraeth Marshes, breeding and training sheepdogs, and the only crooks he collared were shepherds' crooks that were works of art.
Bob Ty Lawr lived in a barn with his long dog Fly. When he was refused a drink in a posh coastal pub, the Mermaid, he picked up a the goldfish bowl, drank it, ate the fish, stamped out of the pub, jumped into the Menai Strait and swam to Caernarfon where he had four pints in The Castle and then swam back. Eddie Pont Dic was part cap, an oily plate that grew like a fungus from the top of his head. He observed of caravanners who rented his orchard: “Funny people the Sais (English). They eats in the garden and shits in the house.”
Owen Thief was a brilliant footballer. He had the talent of a young George Best. He was the only boy to be capped twice for the Welsh Schoolboys. Everton snatched him up as soon as he left school. An Anglesey boy who had barely crossed the Menai Bridge except to pay football, the bright lights of Liverpool dazzled him. On his first night he fell into bad company and discovered drink. Subsequently he was sent to prison where he shared a cell with Harry McVicar.
I once gave it as my opinion that Gwyn the Lift was the perfect name for the village taxi driver. I was deafened by snorts of disbelief. ”Don't leave anything lying about,“ I was warned.
Gwyn shared the wife of a farm labourer by whom he had a son. He blamed it on the black out. Both he and his wife took a great interest in the boy's welfare and visited him weekly. The labourer explained to me: “I don't like what is going on but what can I do? I have got to have my shirts washed.”
The wife of an oyster farmer, Terry Barrack, moved in with the landlord of the local inn, The Groeslon. “It's terrible,” Terry told me,“I have to go all the way to Menai Bridge for a pint.”
Our councillor's husband Glyn Brownson, who was half Indian, was “Glyndustani”. An Indian pedlar who came to his door was met with a torrent of Indian. “ Go easy,” said the pedlar nervously in a broad Welsh accent, “I'm from Cardiff.”
After dining with the script writer John Stephenson, I realised that I kept swerving to the wrong side of the road. I stopped the car at the nearest phone box.
“Who you ringing?” asked John. “The police,” I told him. ”I need a lift home.”
Horrified, he insisted on taking the wheel. I told Gwyn, our other bobby, about it and it was his turn to be horrified. “He had no right stopping you ringing me,” he said. ”That is how accidents are caused.”
My wife and I were under the protective wing of the village family of black sheep, called cruelly the 'cacau'. The eldest,Trevor, asked me if I had any gardening jobs. Since it was December, I had none. So he went to the Groeslon, snatched the till and ran away with it. He got about five yards and two years in prison.
His brother Raymond came to us every year for his Xmas dinner (we subsequently discovered he went to five other houses). Trefor had told me it was my fault he stole the till because I wouldn't give him any gardening. The logic was faulty but I still felt guilty. Raymond told me that because of a warders' strike his brother was being held in a police station cell in Wrexham. I had many friends there so I rang the custody sergeant to ask him to put Trevor on the phone so we could wish him a Merry Xmas.
The sergeant quivered with indignation: “You should know better, Skiddy.” “Aw, come on,” I said, “who is going to know?” “It's not a matter of that. He's not had his pudding yet. You'll have to ring back in half an hour.”
* * * * * * * * * *
The United States is governed by fewer than six hundred senators and congressmen. Our tiny disunited kingdom has more peers than that. We also have six hundred and twenty-five MPs, three devolved governments and a plethora of Metropolitan councils. Since most of our governance emanates in Brussels, this would seem over generous. I believe we would be better governed by an Oligarchy with Cable as Chancellor, assisted by Major, a banker, who never gets the credit he deserves for bringing peace to Northern Ireland, Haig as Foreign Secretary, Field, assisted by Duncan Smith, as Home Secretary and Colonel Tootal, late of 3 Para, as Minister for Defence. It would be difficult for them to make a worse fist of it than the current incompetents. Cabinet talent is so scarce that one minister was confirmed in her job as Attorney General after being fined £5,000 for breaking her own law. She described it as no worse than a parking offence, which to her it probably isn't. She has allegedly wrongly claimed £170,000 expenses.
They are not all bad. As it happens I had lunch this week with one of the new baronesses. I explained I have given up tonic water because it is the reason I am putting on weight and all wine tastes of jam. She understood perfectly and put a bottle of gin by my plate. Her noblesse clearly in full oblige.
When in another life I was Welsh, it annoyed me that the Welsh were seen as narrow- minded chapel-goers, in suits made from the battered covers of old prayer books. The enmity between North and South is virulent. Gwyn Thomas, a South Walian, said of the Northerners: “Their idea of gaiety is a purple spotted shroud.”
That is neither true nor kind. Rene Cutforth was nearer the mark: “Mediterranean in the rain.” Certainly that is true of the 'gwerin', the working men and women I knew when I lived on Anglesey. It was the faux middle class who invented nationalism, largely to ring fence the good jobs on offer.
The working class are witty, funny, generous and respect scholarship. It would never occur to them to think of creative writing, as the English do, as a hobby. The Welsh peasants are quick witted and wildly generous. An eminent psychiatrist Dafydd Alun Jones once pointed out to me that 'spree' is a Welsh word (sbri in Welsh). It describes the actions of God-fearing farmers who disappear for days of revelry. Only getting home in time for Sunday chapel.
He said the reason his countrymen had so many religious revivals was that their eagerness to debauch was forever leading them to the edge of the Pit, from which the revivals dragged them back.
My mates were people like Hughie Bugail who was our village policeman. Well, that is what the Chief Constable thought. Bugail means shepherd and Hughie's main occupation was policing the flock of pedigree sheep he kept on Malltraeth Marshes, breeding and training sheepdogs, and the only crooks he collared were shepherds' crooks that were works of art.
Bob Ty Lawr lived in a barn with his long dog Fly. When he was refused a drink in a posh coastal pub, the Mermaid, he picked up a the goldfish bowl, drank it, ate the fish, stamped out of the pub, jumped into the Menai Strait and swam to Caernarfon where he had four pints in The Castle and then swam back. Eddie Pont Dic was part cap, an oily plate that grew like a fungus from the top of his head. He observed of caravanners who rented his orchard: “Funny people the Sais (English). They eats in the garden and shits in the house.”
Owen Thief was a brilliant footballer. He had the talent of a young George Best. He was the only boy to be capped twice for the Welsh Schoolboys. Everton snatched him up as soon as he left school. An Anglesey boy who had barely crossed the Menai Bridge except to pay football, the bright lights of Liverpool dazzled him. On his first night he fell into bad company and discovered drink. Subsequently he was sent to prison where he shared a cell with Harry McVicar.
I once gave it as my opinion that Gwyn the Lift was the perfect name for the village taxi driver. I was deafened by snorts of disbelief. ”Don't leave anything lying about,“ I was warned.
Gwyn shared the wife of a farm labourer by whom he had a son. He blamed it on the black out. Both he and his wife took a great interest in the boy's welfare and visited him weekly. The labourer explained to me: “I don't like what is going on but what can I do? I have got to have my shirts washed.”
The wife of an oyster farmer, Terry Barrack, moved in with the landlord of the local inn, The Groeslon. “It's terrible,” Terry told me,“I have to go all the way to Menai Bridge for a pint.”
Our councillor's husband Glyn Brownson, who was half Indian, was “Glyndustani”. An Indian pedlar who came to his door was met with a torrent of Indian. “ Go easy,” said the pedlar nervously in a broad Welsh accent, “I'm from Cardiff.”
After dining with the script writer John Stephenson, I realised that I kept swerving to the wrong side of the road. I stopped the car at the nearest phone box.
“Who you ringing?” asked John. “The police,” I told him. ”I need a lift home.”
Horrified, he insisted on taking the wheel. I told Gwyn, our other bobby, about it and it was his turn to be horrified. “He had no right stopping you ringing me,” he said. ”That is how accidents are caused.”
My wife and I were under the protective wing of the village family of black sheep, called cruelly the 'cacau'. The eldest,Trevor, asked me if I had any gardening jobs. Since it was December, I had none. So he went to the Groeslon, snatched the till and ran away with it. He got about five yards and two years in prison.
His brother Raymond came to us every year for his Xmas dinner (we subsequently discovered he went to five other houses). Trefor had told me it was my fault he stole the till because I wouldn't give him any gardening. The logic was faulty but I still felt guilty. Raymond told me that because of a warders' strike his brother was being held in a police station cell in Wrexham. I had many friends there so I rang the custody sergeant to ask him to put Trevor on the phone so we could wish him a Merry Xmas.
The sergeant quivered with indignation: “You should know better, Skiddy.” “Aw, come on,” I said, “who is going to know?” “It's not a matter of that. He's not had his pudding yet. You'll have to ring back in half an hour.”
* * * * * * * * * *
The United States is governed by fewer than six hundred senators and congressmen. Our tiny disunited kingdom has more peers than that. We also have six hundred and twenty-five MPs, three devolved governments and a plethora of Metropolitan councils. Since most of our governance emanates in Brussels, this would seem over generous. I believe we would be better governed by an Oligarchy with Cable as Chancellor, assisted by Major, a banker, who never gets the credit he deserves for bringing peace to Northern Ireland, Haig as Foreign Secretary, Field, assisted by Duncan Smith, as Home Secretary and Colonel Tootal, late of 3 Para, as Minister for Defence. It would be difficult for them to make a worse fist of it than the current incompetents. Cabinet talent is so scarce that one minister was confirmed in her job as Attorney General after being fined £5,000 for breaking her own law. She described it as no worse than a parking offence, which to her it probably isn't. She has allegedly wrongly claimed £170,000 expenses.
They are not all bad. As it happens I had lunch this week with one of the new baronesses. I explained I have given up tonic water because it is the reason I am putting on weight and all wine tastes of jam. She understood perfectly and put a bottle of gin by my plate. Her noblesse clearly in full oblige.
Saturday, 19 September 2009
A PRIDE OF YOUNG LIONS
The Queen of Sheba asked Solomon for a ring inscription which would always be true whatever the circumstances. He offered: “This Too Shall Pass”.
That hilarious physical cartoon which is the nearest we have to a Defence Secretary tells us he has a dilemma - and I must say he looks it.
The generals are telling him he must increase the defence budget, whereas his constituents want him to cut it. The inscription I would offer him is equally simple: “We Can No Longer Afford Aggressive Warfare”.
I am currently reading “Danger Close; Commanding 3 Para in Afghanistan” by its former C.O. Stuart Tootal DSO. He warns that we will be in Afghanistan for decades. Why?
Mr Brown said in December: "Three-quarters of the most serious plots investigated by the British authorities have links to al-Qaeda in Pakistan. Our aim must be to work together to do everything in our power to cut off terrorism."
No one showed him an atlas so he could see that for the second time we had invaded the wrong country. Predictably, his claim angered Pakistanis because he was on a goodwill visit to Pakistan at the time.
A senior diplomat there said that in seven plots no Pakistani person was involved. “True, a Briton of Pakistani origin, but a third-generation, born and bought up in Britain. We don't agree with Brown's claims that three-quarters of these plots originate in Pakistan. We don't have a magic wand to turn these people into extremists. These people were born in Britain, taught there, bred there."
The terrorists who planned to blow up airliners were all British. It would appear we need our soldiers nearer home. The idea that we should invade a foreign country in order to protect the homeland is risible.
“Attack State Red”, the story of the Anglian Regiment in Afghanistan, is probably the greatest book on war I have ever read. It is so obviously true and written in such detail, and indeed with such controlled passion, readers should automatically qualify for a campaign medal. It's so real I could not finish it. Those magnificent young men with such qualities of bravery and loyalty to each other remind one of the Spartans at Thermopylae, who were, according to a tablet there, "a shining example of belief and dedication to duty and higher moral values and ideals."
Their memorial on the battlefield by the poet Simonides reads: "Go tell the Spartans, passerby/ That here by Spartan law we lie."
Ruskin thought them the noblest words ever uttered by man and they also apply to those Anglian soldiers.
I keep thinking how desperately we need such men to grow old in their service to their country. Not blown to bits in a squalid post-colonial adventure, the stated aim of which is to keep in power a corrupt government. That is a new aim because the original one was “to rid the country of al-Qaeda” (which is next door in Pakistan) and to rid the country of its opium (when the sensible aim would be to pay a higher price for the poppy juice, purchasing the entire crop and using it for medicine). Further aims, we are told, are to bring democracy and establish equal rights for women (in direct defiance of an age old corrupt culture run by War Lords, who, anyway, we are bribing). And in that endeavour our young men risk capture and being skinned, as has happened to scores of Russians, the skin from their stomachs being pulled over their heads.
Not in my name.
One other thing. There is no disciplined army called al-Qaeda. That is spin. The enemy is the Wahabi, a desert tribe recruited by Ibn Saud to win his new kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Wahabi price was that he adopted their perverted interpretation of the Koran as the national religion of the kingdom which was foreign to the mainstream Arab thought. It was Wahabi warriors who were partly responsible for the Indian Mutiny and for fermenting anti-West behaviour ever since. I assume the reason they are not identified springs from a reluctance to offend the Saudi Royals.
============================ ===== ============================
I think we have much to fear from our mis-government which is clearly not on our side. Look at us in Our Land of Hope and Glory, groping our way in the half light thrown by those EC bulbs, desperate for a cigarette, no doubt bumping our knees on the slop bucket which by law we will be required to keep in the kitchen. Fingers numb with cold because we cannot turn the heating up, we sort through our other rubbish to make sure it is in the right bin; terrified of taking the dog for a walk in case it chases a rabbit; faced with a £5,000 fine if we take next door's kids to the shops; and watching powerless as the banks we have just bailed out with £60 billion of our hard earned money refuse us an overdraft whilst awarding themselves bonuses, despite bringing the World Economy to near collapse.
We Unhappy Few are ruled by a government that sells Rover cars for £10,000 to a group of men who award themselves millions and give another million to a girl friend. They won't get away with it, of course. Lord Meddlesome sternly hopes they will apologise and promise not to do it again.
If our island home is Mother of the Free, then I, for one, want to get adopted.
_______________________ ___________________________ ______________________
== ========== ============ ============== ========= ================
Were you to ask, I would describe myself as an elderly gentleman of quiet pursuits, academic leaning and pleasing contours. Why tailors do not share this view is beyond me.
When I ordered a cashmere duffel coat from Thailand, the tailor telephoned me at enormous expense from Bangkok because he didn't believe my measurements. A Scottish tailor, who was making me Highland dress for my grand-daughter's wedding, refused to believe I was 55 inches both round the chest and what I laughingly call my waist. “Have you never heard of all round reporters?” I asked witheringly.
Many years ago in Doncaster when I was still 10 stone I was being measured for one of those fashionable Edwardian suits with the drainpipe trousers, the cuffs on the five button jacket and the velvet collar, a style later stolen by the Hoi Polloi.
“I don't believe it,” said the tailor. “Your measurements. Amazing. Would you mind if I called in my colleague from next door?”
When the other tailor came in, he too was invited to measure me. He was astounded. “One shoulder higher than the other, the legs are different sizes and so are the feet.”
I have since learned that 99 per cent of us have a slightly lower right shoulder and most of us have different foot measurements. But by then the damage had been done.
This week I suffered the final indignities.
I want to have a tweed sports jacket built. My own man in March can only get the duller tweeds. Because of the credit squeeze, and the action of a millionaire who has bought the Harris mill on the Isle of Harris, only four dull weaves are being offered. Eventually I found a tailor in Ross on Wye with the sort of tweeds that would stun a bookmaker. I explained my situation to him and had my man in March measure me so there could be no error. When the new tailor read the measurements he emailed me, querying them and offering to sell the tweed direct to my own man, so that he could build the jacket.
Spotting a vintage velvet smoking jacket on E Bay, I sent off my measurements to the seller. I got a one word reply. It was:
“WHAT??”
___------------------------ ------------------------ -------------------------
THE END IS NIGH.....................................
That hilarious physical cartoon which is the nearest we have to a Defence Secretary tells us he has a dilemma - and I must say he looks it.
The generals are telling him he must increase the defence budget, whereas his constituents want him to cut it. The inscription I would offer him is equally simple: “We Can No Longer Afford Aggressive Warfare”.
I am currently reading “Danger Close; Commanding 3 Para in Afghanistan” by its former C.O. Stuart Tootal DSO. He warns that we will be in Afghanistan for decades. Why?
Mr Brown said in December: "Three-quarters of the most serious plots investigated by the British authorities have links to al-Qaeda in Pakistan. Our aim must be to work together to do everything in our power to cut off terrorism."
No one showed him an atlas so he could see that for the second time we had invaded the wrong country. Predictably, his claim angered Pakistanis because he was on a goodwill visit to Pakistan at the time.
A senior diplomat there said that in seven plots no Pakistani person was involved. “True, a Briton of Pakistani origin, but a third-generation, born and bought up in Britain. We don't agree with Brown's claims that three-quarters of these plots originate in Pakistan. We don't have a magic wand to turn these people into extremists. These people were born in Britain, taught there, bred there."
The terrorists who planned to blow up airliners were all British. It would appear we need our soldiers nearer home. The idea that we should invade a foreign country in order to protect the homeland is risible.
“Attack State Red”, the story of the Anglian Regiment in Afghanistan, is probably the greatest book on war I have ever read. It is so obviously true and written in such detail, and indeed with such controlled passion, readers should automatically qualify for a campaign medal. It's so real I could not finish it. Those magnificent young men with such qualities of bravery and loyalty to each other remind one of the Spartans at Thermopylae, who were, according to a tablet there, "a shining example of belief and dedication to duty and higher moral values and ideals."
Their memorial on the battlefield by the poet Simonides reads: "Go tell the Spartans, passerby/ That here by Spartan law we lie."
Ruskin thought them the noblest words ever uttered by man and they also apply to those Anglian soldiers.
I keep thinking how desperately we need such men to grow old in their service to their country. Not blown to bits in a squalid post-colonial adventure, the stated aim of which is to keep in power a corrupt government. That is a new aim because the original one was “to rid the country of al-Qaeda” (which is next door in Pakistan) and to rid the country of its opium (when the sensible aim would be to pay a higher price for the poppy juice, purchasing the entire crop and using it for medicine). Further aims, we are told, are to bring democracy and establish equal rights for women (in direct defiance of an age old corrupt culture run by War Lords, who, anyway, we are bribing). And in that endeavour our young men risk capture and being skinned, as has happened to scores of Russians, the skin from their stomachs being pulled over their heads.
Not in my name.
One other thing. There is no disciplined army called al-Qaeda. That is spin. The enemy is the Wahabi, a desert tribe recruited by Ibn Saud to win his new kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Wahabi price was that he adopted their perverted interpretation of the Koran as the national religion of the kingdom which was foreign to the mainstream Arab thought. It was Wahabi warriors who were partly responsible for the Indian Mutiny and for fermenting anti-West behaviour ever since. I assume the reason they are not identified springs from a reluctance to offend the Saudi Royals.
============================ ===== ============================
I think we have much to fear from our mis-government which is clearly not on our side. Look at us in Our Land of Hope and Glory, groping our way in the half light thrown by those EC bulbs, desperate for a cigarette, no doubt bumping our knees on the slop bucket which by law we will be required to keep in the kitchen. Fingers numb with cold because we cannot turn the heating up, we sort through our other rubbish to make sure it is in the right bin; terrified of taking the dog for a walk in case it chases a rabbit; faced with a £5,000 fine if we take next door's kids to the shops; and watching powerless as the banks we have just bailed out with £60 billion of our hard earned money refuse us an overdraft whilst awarding themselves bonuses, despite bringing the World Economy to near collapse.
We Unhappy Few are ruled by a government that sells Rover cars for £10,000 to a group of men who award themselves millions and give another million to a girl friend. They won't get away with it, of course. Lord Meddlesome sternly hopes they will apologise and promise not to do it again.
If our island home is Mother of the Free, then I, for one, want to get adopted.
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Were you to ask, I would describe myself as an elderly gentleman of quiet pursuits, academic leaning and pleasing contours. Why tailors do not share this view is beyond me.
When I ordered a cashmere duffel coat from Thailand, the tailor telephoned me at enormous expense from Bangkok because he didn't believe my measurements. A Scottish tailor, who was making me Highland dress for my grand-daughter's wedding, refused to believe I was 55 inches both round the chest and what I laughingly call my waist. “Have you never heard of all round reporters?” I asked witheringly.
Many years ago in Doncaster when I was still 10 stone I was being measured for one of those fashionable Edwardian suits with the drainpipe trousers, the cuffs on the five button jacket and the velvet collar, a style later stolen by the Hoi Polloi.
“I don't believe it,” said the tailor. “Your measurements. Amazing. Would you mind if I called in my colleague from next door?”
When the other tailor came in, he too was invited to measure me. He was astounded. “One shoulder higher than the other, the legs are different sizes and so are the feet.”
I have since learned that 99 per cent of us have a slightly lower right shoulder and most of us have different foot measurements. But by then the damage had been done.
This week I suffered the final indignities.
I want to have a tweed sports jacket built. My own man in March can only get the duller tweeds. Because of the credit squeeze, and the action of a millionaire who has bought the Harris mill on the Isle of Harris, only four dull weaves are being offered. Eventually I found a tailor in Ross on Wye with the sort of tweeds that would stun a bookmaker. I explained my situation to him and had my man in March measure me so there could be no error. When the new tailor read the measurements he emailed me, querying them and offering to sell the tweed direct to my own man, so that he could build the jacket.
Spotting a vintage velvet smoking jacket on E Bay, I sent off my measurements to the seller. I got a one word reply. It was:
“WHAT??”
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THE END IS NIGH.....................................
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