I once lived in Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. When I said it English listeners found my command of language impressive. Welsh speaking listeners shuddered.
That was my problem. I lived in a place I could not pronounce.
The Welsh can do things with their curious assemblies of letters that in other cultures can only be achieved by musical notation. Welsh is not just a language: it is performance art. "Bechod" is pity carried almost to the point of tears and no girl, surely, can resist the sweet blandishment of "cariad"; against which sweetheart sounds like a lump of toffee.
In Wales, pronounciation is the key to acceptance. It is phonetic freemasonry and it is planetary.
I used to broadcast every week to Australia a newsletter about life in Britain. I was a sort of Alistair Coookaburra.
Because - as it sometimes seems - the entire population of Australia is either Welsh or from Liverpool, which is much
the same thing, my producer insisted that I call it "A Letter from Llanfairpwyllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwll-
llantysiliogogogoch".
I tried not to because whenever I did an irate Welsh Australian telephoned me from Brisbane to complain. His
telephone bill must have been longer than my address. Not only can I not PRONOUNCE Llanfairpwyllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogoch; nor even act it. I cannot write it down except with great difficulty. Mail order purchase, the mad lottery of the glossy magazine bargain offer, was forever closed to me. There was never room on the coupon for my address.
An abbreviation? There was once.LlanfairPG. But there is a Welsh phrase for political correctness too. LlanfairPG is an invitation to the curled lip. The only acceptable PC alternative to PG is Llanfairpwyllgwyngyll. You cannot go
very far with an abbreviation that is twenty letters long. Nor can you easily get credit. I was refused credit for the purchase of a word processor. The credit regulatory office was in Leeds. And the Yorkshire computer would not accept that an island called Anglesey existed.
To live in a fictional island, in a village you cannot pronounce, is to know despair.
I once had a letter from Wiltshire. It was sent air mail.
To be strictly ecumenical, I have had some pretty bizarre postal experiences in England. When we used to live on the
City Walls in Chester I worked under the window in the drawing room - I will write in a future column about bitter
injustice and how whenever we move my wife gets a study and I write on the corner of a table. Through the window I could watch the postman coming, a mixed blessing when you owe as much as I did in those halcyon days of determined debauchery.
One day a month I looked forward to his visits. That was the day he brought my selection from Records With Pleasure,
recordings of potted versions of Shakespearean plays put out by the Daily Express. On this occasion I hurried to the door to take the precious recording from his hands. Too late. He had already folded it neatly in half and posted it through the box.
There was a certain cachet in having the only crescent-shaped production of Macbeth on record, but playing was not easy. No sooner had the warrior tones of Macbeth boomed questions at the three witches than Birnam Wood was galloping to Dunsinane as the needles slipped down the inner slope of the crescent like demented skiers.
The man the Post Office sent to process my complaint was dressed to intimidate.Why else should a man who arrived
on a red bicycle wear a crash helmet and black leather gauntlet gloves? He clearly did not believe my story. Indeed
he seemed convinced I was the Mr Big of an international ring of record benders. Finally he conceded my complaint. But he was not done. As he left he uttered a sentence that has lodged itself in my mind: "Do not dispose of the record without permission," he warned. "It is now the property of the Post Office and we may need to call it in."
For God's sake, tell me. Does the Post Office run to crescent-shaped gramophones?
A VALUABLE SOCIAL LESSON....
A pity if you missed the chance to read this week's 'Ranters' blog. Ranters is a weekly meander round the newspapers of their youth by old stagers and is the inspiration of my chum Revel Barker, sometime Consiglieri to Cap'n Bob Maxwell of the Mirror. A regular contributor is William Greaves, who this week offered a useful piece of etiquette, which, in keeping with another hallowed tradition of our trade - stealing another chap's bright ideas - I "lift" without shame.
If you are not already on its journalists’ mailing list, and want to be reminded when the site is updated each week, send your name and email address to: rantersreader@gmail.com
Short arms, deep pockets
By William Greaves
There is one familiar expression in the English language which appears in no international phrase book – for the simple reason that foreigners would be able to make neither head nor tail of it.
The phrase is: ‘It’s my round.’ It has a number of variations: the assertive ‘No, no, it’s definitely my round’, the quizzically aggrieved ‘Whose round is it?’ and even the faintly aggressive ‘It can’t be my round again, surely.’
When two or more people assemble to quench their thirst in a public place anywhere east of Dover or west of the Scillies, a bill is pushed under the saucer each time a new batch of drinks arrives. Or a beer mat is marked, slate chalked or spike spiked. Upon departure, the final tally is then added up and divided among all present. Fair – but unsporting.
No nation which invented cricket could seriously be expected to comply with a code of conduct so morosely bereft of complication that all the niceties of lifemanship and etiquette are swamped by simple arithmetic. So the difference between the British pub and every other kind of alien bar is that, here, we pay before we sip. Correction: one person pays before everyone sips.
So the British pub – and the atmosphere which prevails within – is unique in so much as every new order is a personal gift by one patron to all his or her friends or colleagues.
But who is that one patron? Here is the nub around which the very British game of ‘pubbing’ revolves. For not only is the ‘round’ (defined in my Collins Concise as ‘a number of drinks bought at one time for a number of people’) deeply engrained in the national ethos, it is also deliciously ill-defined in the matter of whose turn it is to dig deep.
There was a time, before bitter gave way to Budweiser, when such a question would never have had to be asked. Tyro drinkers would be so overawed by their surroundings – and the dangers that lurked within – that they would nervously ape their experienced elders. In other words, they would learn by natural instinct when it was their turn to put hand in pocket.
Some years ago, in the days when newspapers lived in Fleet Street and the round often assumed titanic dimensions, I became aware that standards were falling. Appalling laxities like tossing a coin or engaging in a game of spoof in order to determine who should pay were creeping in to replace the proper order of things. Some players even sank to the unpardonable depths of ‘round avoidance,’ arriving late, enjoying several drinks and then, in the nick of time, spotting someone across the room with whom they ‘must just grab a word.’
It was not entirely the young students’ fault. A new and impetuous generation may well have sprung, improperly dressed, upon the scene – but who can learn when the teachers have forgotten how to teach? In those darkest hours, I realised that The Word had to be spread before a glorious national heritage was allowed to wither on the vine.
The result of this initiative became known throughout the pubs in that street of shame as Greaves’s Rules. Under their auspices not only were rounds ordered but tribunals commissioned and even sentences passed. Once-respected men today walk shoeless down Oxford Street for having transgressed against them.
It was a fragile claim to eponymous immortality – and certainly not one I sought to patent in documentary form – but this website has now invited me to publish those same edicts as a reminder that nothing in our history is so sacred that it cannot be forgotten.
And so, for whom it might concern, here are Greaves’s Rules. Pin them up above or near the bar counter. Then even foreign visitors might stumble across some thinly understood enlightenment.
GREAVES’ RULES
1.When two or more enter the pub together, one - usually the first through the door - will begin proceedings with the words "Now then, what are we having?" He or she will then order and pay. This purchase is known as "the first round".
2.This player, or "opener", will remain "in the chair" while other friends or colleagues come through the door to join the round. He will remain in this benefactory role until either (a) his own glass sinks to beneath the half way mark or (b) another drinker finds himself almost bereft of his original refreshment and volunteers to "start a new round".
3.In the absence of new arrivals, any player other than the opener may at any time inquire whether it is "the same again?" On receiving his instructions, he will then order and pay for "the second round". (N.B. The second round is the last one to be specifically numbered. Beyond that point, nobody wishes to be reminded how many they have had and, anyway, no-one should be counting.)
4.The round acknowledges no discrimination. All players, regardless of sex, age or social status, are expected to "stand their corner". (Pedants might like to note that we are talking here of the only "round" in the English language that also contains a "corner".
5.Any new entrant, joining the session after its inception, is not expected to "buy himself in" but should be invited to join the round by whoever is in the chair (see Rule 2). If, however, he is greeted by silence he may either (a) buy a drink just for himself or (b) attempt to buy a round for all present. If (a) or, worse still, (b) is not acceptable to the congregation then the new entrant has been snubbed and should in future seek out more appreciative company. There is one important exception...
6.For reasons of haste or poverty, a new arrival may insist on buying his own with the words "Thanks, but I'm only popping in for one". If he is then seen to buy more than three drinks, he will be deemed a skinflint, neither broke nor in a hurry to get home, and will be penalised for his duplicity by being ordered to buy the next round.
7.Although everyone in the group is normally required to buy at least one round before leaving, the advent of either drunkenness or closing time sometimes renders this ideal unattainable. In such circumstances, any non-paying participant will (a) have "got away with it" and (b) appoint himself "opener" at the next forgathering. However, any player who notices on arrival that the round has "got out of hand" and has no chance of reaching his turn before "the last bell", may start a "breakaway round" by buying a drink for himself and all subsequent arrivals. This stratagem breaks the round in two, keeps the cost within manageable proportions and is the only acceptable alternative to Rule 5.
8.When a pressing engagement elsewhere precludes further involvement, it is wholly unacceptable for any player who has not yet been in the chair to buy a round in which he cannot himself be included. In such circumstances Rule 7 (a) and (b) therefore apply.
9.In the event of any one glass becoming empty, a new round must be called immediately. This should not necessarily be called by the owner of the empty glass, however, because this place the slower drinker at an unfair fund-saving advantage. (N.B. Whereas it is permissible for any member of the round to decrease the capacity of his individual order - "just a half for me, please" - the opposite does not hold good. A large whisky, for instance, may be offered by the chair but never demanded of it.)
10.Regional variations. In various parts of the country, a particular establishment will impose its own individual codicil. In one Yorkshire pub, for example, the landlord's Jack Russell terrier expects to be included in every round. Where such amendments exist, and are properly advertised, they must be piously observed. We are, after all, talking about a religion.
END NOTE FROM NEW YORK TIMES
"Marriage is like water. You have to drink it. Swinging is like wine. Some people feel it’s delicious the first time they try it, so they keep drinking. Some people try it and think it tastes bad, so they never drink it again."
MA YAOHAI, whom a Chinese court sentenced to prison for “crowd licentiousness".
Crowd licentiousness?
Friday, 21 May 2010
Saturday, 15 May 2010
BAGS OF COALITION
It has taken Germany over a century to win the war. Bismarck failed, the Kaiser failed, Hitler failed, but a mousy little woman called Mrs Merkel has pulled it off without so much as a blow. Right Mark!!!!... and into the heart of Brussels for the second time.
This time they achieved victory by buying Europe rather than bombing it and by happy coincidence it has happened as Britain created the first coalition government since the last war.
This is a parliament I have been longing for all my adult life. I am Coalition Man. One party government means you only get a third of the talent available. Heath, Blair and Brown wrecked this septic isle.
By the same token I was desperately afraid the Liberals were going to join the exhausted Labour party. That would have meant England had lost the other war it has been fighting for a millennium with the Welsh, the Irish and the Scots.
The Saxon dog would have been wagged by a tartan tail shaped like a leek and reeking of whisky. I have more Welsh friends than I have English and I am a quarter Scots. Nevertheless when I lived in Wales I was violently opposed to devolution. Now I live in England I am in favour of Home Rule for both Wales and Scotland. If only to get rid of James Naughtie and all those Kirsties.
In Celtic countries nepotism rules and deviousness is an art form. A Welsh proverb exults: "I'll never starve: I've got a cousin on the council."
We had a neighbour on Anglesey who wanted to buy outright the drive she shared with the farm behind her cottage.The farmer refused for years. When one day one of his pigs ate her window sill she saw her chance.
She told us: "I put a stamp on a piece of paper and went round to the farm. I said, 'Your pig has eaten my window' and Jones farmer he said, 'Duw, that's going to cost me.' So I says, ' Not as much as it's going to cost you to fill in all those potholes in the lane.' 'Duw,' he said again, and I see he was worried at the thought of spending money. So I whipped out my bit o' paper and got him to sign over the stamp a bill of sale for the drive."
That sort of devious mind you don't mess with.
I spent forty years writing stories for the dailies and the national Sundays about corruption in Welsh local government at operatic levels. Anglesey, in my thirty years there, was investigated four times by the Fraud Squad. Limitations on the number of caravans per site did not seem to apply to a Chief Clerk of the Council, now deceased, who owned a sprawling site the size of a small town. Owners of a failing hotel applied several times in vain for planning permission to turn it into a block of flats. Sold at the bottom of the market, it was bought by an estate agent heading a syndicate made up of councillors. Within a month the hotel became a block of flats. The agent went on to take a plum job in the council.
The headmaster of a Welsh school had praise and rewards heaped on him until he left to take over a school owned by English RAF families. Overnight, planning permissions for extra classrooms were routinely denied and every obstacle imaginable put in his path.
We simple Saxons have had a narrow escape.
A TRIBUTE TO THE FIRST BLOGGER
Five hundred years ago the Mayor of Bordeaux gave up his day job, went home and invented the essay, the progenitor of the newspaper column and the blog. In doing so he opened the way for Addison, Steele, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Lamb and the great Dr Johnson. The newspapers we read today grew out of the pamphlets they wrote.
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592) wrote like an angel. Stefen Zweig said of him: "Here is a 'you' in which my 'I' is reflected; here is where all distance is abolished. The printed page fades from view; a living person steps into the room instead."
He leaped from the page and sat at your side. I have shared that feeling since I was ten and took his Essays out of Withington library in the belief they were a text book and would help me in English lessons. They have been on my shelves ever since. Now, thanks to E-Book, the best present I have ever had, I can carry them about with me in a magic wallet and still have room for Gibbon, Herodotus and Homer. I am armed against every vicissitude. There is still room for Shakespeare and an anthology of verse and it would be the work of a moment to download, at half price, the current bestseller. Not to mention the several million out of print books which are free on the internet. The E-Book is the most important contribution to literature since Montaigne wrote that first essay and every bit as important as the creation of movable type. It is one of the joys of living in the Space Age that you can carry your home about with you. The library, the radiogram and a combined telephone and camera all fit snugly in a pocket.
What would Montaigne have made of the E-Book? He would certainly have written about it. As it was he had no difficuty finding a subject. He chose the one on which he was the greatest living expert. He chose to write about himself. He explained it by saying: "If my mind could gain a firm footing I would not make essays, I would make decisions, but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial."
He wrote about little things. Like the custom of wearing clothes, drunkenness, lust and fear; how we cry and laugh at the same thing; of cowardice, of letting business wait for the morrow; of smells and age; of anger and of not to counterfeit sickness. He wrote of cannibals, of whom he rather approved. He said, "Each man calls barbarism what is not his own practice" and so much more. He wrote about great things like friendship. His essay on the death of his friend Etienne de La Boetie is one of the most moving tributes I have read. He also wrote: "The sage lives as long as he should, not as long as he can."
If he was odd, his father was odder. As soon as Michel was born his father had him taken to a peasant's hut where he stayed until the age of eleven. Thus he would know when he took over the family estate, that peasants were not chattels, they were people and must be cared for. He learned to appreciate their rough humour. He told of commiserating with a woman who had been raped by six soldiers. She told him there was no need for sorrow. "It is the first time I have been pleasured without sin."
When he at last came back to the manor, the family and the servants spoke to him only in Latin so that he would be fluent at a time when fluency in Latin attracted the best jobs at court.
He wrote so well that when, in the 20th century, an American scholar Marvin Lowenthal wrote an "Autobiography of Michel de Montaigne" he explained the apparent oxymoron by using Montaigne's own words from his essays and letters. He may have been concerned by Montaigne's threat: "I will gladly come back from the other world to give the lie to anyone who will shape me other than, even to honour me." The result was a dazzling piece of scholarship. I have had three copies over the years. Two were mislaid, the third I pursued all over the world before tracking it down in New York. My most treasured possession is the two volume Nonesuch edition of Sir John Florio's translation of Montaigne, the gift nearly half a century ago from a much loved and missed father in law with which he welcomed me into his family.
If I can manage to stay alive overnight, I will be 81 tomorrow. To mark the day I have bought myself the most recent attempt to pin this dazzling butterfly to paper. Sarah Bakewell's "How to Live: A Life of Montaigne" is a gift to be treasured. It is the first full life in fifty years. It tells the story of his youthful career, sexual adventures, friendships and love for his adopted daughter. The story hangs on the most important question he asked "How to Live" and the commonsense answers he gave. "Don't worry about death"; "Pay attention"; "Be born"; "Read a lot, forget most of what you read, and be slow witted"; "Survive love and loss"; "Use little tricks"; "Question everything"; and finally "Let life be its own answer".
I think if I had been given such a book and Lin Yutang's "Importance of Living" I would have needed no others.
This time they achieved victory by buying Europe rather than bombing it and by happy coincidence it has happened as Britain created the first coalition government since the last war.
This is a parliament I have been longing for all my adult life. I am Coalition Man. One party government means you only get a third of the talent available. Heath, Blair and Brown wrecked this septic isle.
By the same token I was desperately afraid the Liberals were going to join the exhausted Labour party. That would have meant England had lost the other war it has been fighting for a millennium with the Welsh, the Irish and the Scots.
The Saxon dog would have been wagged by a tartan tail shaped like a leek and reeking of whisky. I have more Welsh friends than I have English and I am a quarter Scots. Nevertheless when I lived in Wales I was violently opposed to devolution. Now I live in England I am in favour of Home Rule for both Wales and Scotland. If only to get rid of James Naughtie and all those Kirsties.
In Celtic countries nepotism rules and deviousness is an art form. A Welsh proverb exults: "I'll never starve: I've got a cousin on the council."
We had a neighbour on Anglesey who wanted to buy outright the drive she shared with the farm behind her cottage.The farmer refused for years. When one day one of his pigs ate her window sill she saw her chance.
She told us: "I put a stamp on a piece of paper and went round to the farm. I said, 'Your pig has eaten my window' and Jones farmer he said, 'Duw, that's going to cost me.' So I says, ' Not as much as it's going to cost you to fill in all those potholes in the lane.' 'Duw,' he said again, and I see he was worried at the thought of spending money. So I whipped out my bit o' paper and got him to sign over the stamp a bill of sale for the drive."
That sort of devious mind you don't mess with.
I spent forty years writing stories for the dailies and the national Sundays about corruption in Welsh local government at operatic levels. Anglesey, in my thirty years there, was investigated four times by the Fraud Squad. Limitations on the number of caravans per site did not seem to apply to a Chief Clerk of the Council, now deceased, who owned a sprawling site the size of a small town. Owners of a failing hotel applied several times in vain for planning permission to turn it into a block of flats. Sold at the bottom of the market, it was bought by an estate agent heading a syndicate made up of councillors. Within a month the hotel became a block of flats. The agent went on to take a plum job in the council.
The headmaster of a Welsh school had praise and rewards heaped on him until he left to take over a school owned by English RAF families. Overnight, planning permissions for extra classrooms were routinely denied and every obstacle imaginable put in his path.
We simple Saxons have had a narrow escape.
A TRIBUTE TO THE FIRST BLOGGER
Five hundred years ago the Mayor of Bordeaux gave up his day job, went home and invented the essay, the progenitor of the newspaper column and the blog. In doing so he opened the way for Addison, Steele, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Lamb and the great Dr Johnson. The newspapers we read today grew out of the pamphlets they wrote.
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592) wrote like an angel. Stefen Zweig said of him: "Here is a 'you' in which my 'I' is reflected; here is where all distance is abolished. The printed page fades from view; a living person steps into the room instead."
He leaped from the page and sat at your side. I have shared that feeling since I was ten and took his Essays out of Withington library in the belief they were a text book and would help me in English lessons. They have been on my shelves ever since. Now, thanks to E-Book, the best present I have ever had, I can carry them about with me in a magic wallet and still have room for Gibbon, Herodotus and Homer. I am armed against every vicissitude. There is still room for Shakespeare and an anthology of verse and it would be the work of a moment to download, at half price, the current bestseller. Not to mention the several million out of print books which are free on the internet. The E-Book is the most important contribution to literature since Montaigne wrote that first essay and every bit as important as the creation of movable type. It is one of the joys of living in the Space Age that you can carry your home about with you. The library, the radiogram and a combined telephone and camera all fit snugly in a pocket.
What would Montaigne have made of the E-Book? He would certainly have written about it. As it was he had no difficuty finding a subject. He chose the one on which he was the greatest living expert. He chose to write about himself. He explained it by saying: "If my mind could gain a firm footing I would not make essays, I would make decisions, but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial."
He wrote about little things. Like the custom of wearing clothes, drunkenness, lust and fear; how we cry and laugh at the same thing; of cowardice, of letting business wait for the morrow; of smells and age; of anger and of not to counterfeit sickness. He wrote of cannibals, of whom he rather approved. He said, "Each man calls barbarism what is not his own practice" and so much more. He wrote about great things like friendship. His essay on the death of his friend Etienne de La Boetie is one of the most moving tributes I have read. He also wrote: "The sage lives as long as he should, not as long as he can."
If he was odd, his father was odder. As soon as Michel was born his father had him taken to a peasant's hut where he stayed until the age of eleven. Thus he would know when he took over the family estate, that peasants were not chattels, they were people and must be cared for. He learned to appreciate their rough humour. He told of commiserating with a woman who had been raped by six soldiers. She told him there was no need for sorrow. "It is the first time I have been pleasured without sin."
When he at last came back to the manor, the family and the servants spoke to him only in Latin so that he would be fluent at a time when fluency in Latin attracted the best jobs at court.
He wrote so well that when, in the 20th century, an American scholar Marvin Lowenthal wrote an "Autobiography of Michel de Montaigne" he explained the apparent oxymoron by using Montaigne's own words from his essays and letters. He may have been concerned by Montaigne's threat: "I will gladly come back from the other world to give the lie to anyone who will shape me other than, even to honour me." The result was a dazzling piece of scholarship. I have had three copies over the years. Two were mislaid, the third I pursued all over the world before tracking it down in New York. My most treasured possession is the two volume Nonesuch edition of Sir John Florio's translation of Montaigne, the gift nearly half a century ago from a much loved and missed father in law with which he welcomed me into his family.
If I can manage to stay alive overnight, I will be 81 tomorrow. To mark the day I have bought myself the most recent attempt to pin this dazzling butterfly to paper. Sarah Bakewell's "How to Live: A Life of Montaigne" is a gift to be treasured. It is the first full life in fifty years. It tells the story of his youthful career, sexual adventures, friendships and love for his adopted daughter. The story hangs on the most important question he asked "How to Live" and the commonsense answers he gave. "Don't worry about death"; "Pay attention"; "Be born"; "Read a lot, forget most of what you read, and be slow witted"; "Survive love and loss"; "Use little tricks"; "Question everything"; and finally "Let life be its own answer".
I think if I had been given such a book and Lin Yutang's "Importance of Living" I would have needed no others.
Saturday, 8 May 2010
VICTORY FOR THE GREEN (HUGHIE) PARTY
Whatever happens after Thursday's debacle it is not my fault. For the first time in half a century I did not vote. Mainly because "Che sera sera", the future is not up to me.
I came to instant indecision watching the "X Factor" in which three second-rate minds auditioned to become chief of the tribe but I decided not to intervene for another reason. A party of civil servants, anxious to set up the machinery of a hung parliament, decided to examine the system at work.
Five countries are prospering under balanced government. Our next door neighbour Scotland is an excellent example. Our mandarins with a glad cry set off for the sunny climes of New Zealand. It was hardly the shortest distance between two points. On arrival they were presented with a manual explaining how to build your own Balanced Parliament. Why didn't they have one sent in the post? Or indeed "tak' the High Road"? We are promised a new super clean parliament but it is patently too early to sell the trough.
In the event, it was the election everybody lost. Clegg committed Hari Kiri when he offered an amnesty to illegal immigrants. Neither of the other parties discussed the prospect of national bankruptcy, brought even nearer when the Dow Jones Index dropped a thousand points on Election Day. Not that it matters that nobody won. Whatever party is elected it will inevitably transmute into a Conservative government. I was tempted to vote Liberal but could not support a party desperate to take us into Europe with indecent haste and which believes in the discredited Euro. After a referendum, of course. I have leaned not to trust promises of referendums.
The most overworked image of the election was the Elephant in the Room. So many crowded into the electoral room I looked vain for Sabu, the Elephant Boy. I wouldn't have been surprised to find his merry little face. Among the experts who were lined up to be interviewed were Bruce Forsyth, Joan Collins, Piers Morgan, a drunken and aimless Amis and others too innumerate to mention. For intelligent comment and criticism there was only Bremner, Bird and Fortune.
Cameron's spectacular vote loser was the admission to Paxman that there would be major cuts in Nothern Ireland and the North East of England. The least offensive policies were those of the Labour party. Brown, a son of the Manse, may be an honest and caring man. He claims to be at every opportunity. His trouble is that he is unlucky and we know what Napoleon thought of unlucky generals. Blair beat him to the succession; when he scrambled into power we were immediately visited with foot and mouth disease (which may or may not be God reprising his trick with the Plagues of Egypt); he sold our Gold Reserves at the bottom of the market and laid the trail for our current problems. His continuing history is a sorry one. The gaff in Rochdale was unimportant. Everyone makes them and the voting public should have been warned when we learned Murdoch's Sun had offered the spurned widow £25,000 to put her name to rude remarks which were to be written for her by Sun employees.
I was at a St Leger dinner in Doncaster Guidhall when the chairman of the race committe Alderman Cammidge proferred Elizabeth II a tureen of vegetables with the words "Have some cabbage, Queen. It's good for the complexion."
Alas I was not present when the very regal Queen Mary rushed from the Royal Train on a visit to Peterloo to examine the royal convenience. As she emerged, a Mayor said sympathetically, "Your Majesty'll feel better for that."
That was never reported. Nor did I report the obscene language with which Prince Philip answered my polite query about his score in a Polo match in Little Budworth. And it would not have occured to me to report my exchanges with Aneurin Bevan.
After Brown's gaffe much was made of his efforts to find out who had included the bigoted widow in the people to whom he talked. The greater gaffe was the admission that the so-called random meetings politicians have are orchestrated by minions who pick the people who will shake hands days before a visit.
A noble friend of mine who is high in the Masonic Hierachy was loaned a Royal car to take him to a function where he was acting for an absent Royal. The car arrived at his house the day before and did a trial run of the entire journey, including comfort stops, lunch and tea breaks. When Princess Margaret subsequently stayed overnight with him he was even told the brand of lavaory tissue she preferred. Only a man as unlucky as Brown would find a woman who had not been vetted and rehearsed by his staff.
Personally I think the party which lost the most was the BBC. For tribal reaons I watched their coverage and was appalled. Millions of people watch Talent Spotting Contests: therefore, said the Suits, we must replace the election coverage with a General Entertainment. Rehearsed, of course, and worked from an agreed script. Unfortunately they got the timing wrong. The whole embarrassing performance began an hour early, long before the first result. The action was set in a studio dressed to represent the Star Ship Enterprise. Only Dr Spock and the delectable Lieutenant Uhuru were missing. For a very long hour the only bone they had to worry was a hypothetical poll. The studio toys would have been more at home in a Christmas store grotto. There was a virtual parliament with Alice in Wonderland dominoes and a swingometer which seemed to baffle its luckless operator. No point in criticising the Dimblebys: like the poorly talented they are always with us. They are there by virtue of being Dimblebys.
By any professional standard, the two "lions" Humphrys and Paxman and their cub Evan Davies were abysmal. They had no interviewing technique to speak of. They are so besotted with the game of politics they have become contestants themselves. The only subject which interested them was the prospect of an unbalanced parliament when the only balance the listeners wanted to hear about was balancing the books.
Byron's epitaph for his dog, Boatswain. Sent by reader Sarah Thomas, for which much thanks
"Near this spot Are deposited the Remains of one Who possessed Beauty without Vanity, Strength without Insolence, Courage without Ferocity, And all the Virtues of Man without his Vices. This Praise, which would be unmeaning Flattery If inscribed over human ashes, Is but a just tribute to the Memory of BOATSWAIN, a Dog, Who was born at Newfoundland, May, 1803, And died at Newstead Abbey, Nov. 18, 1808."
When some proud son of man returns to earth,
Unknown to glory, but upheld by birth,
The sculptor's art exhausts the pomp of woe,
And storied urns record who rests below;
When all is done, upon the tomb is seen
Not what he was but what he should have been.
But the poor dog, in life the firmest friend,
The first to welcome, foremost to defend,
Whose honest heart is all his master's own,
Who labours, fights, lives, breathes for him alone,
Unhonour'd falls, unnoticed all his worth,
Denied in heaven the soul he held on earth;
While man, vain insect! hopes to be forgiven,
And claims himself a sole exclusive heaven.
Oh man! thou feeble tenant of an hour,
Debased by slavery, or corrupt by power,
who knows thee well must quit thee with disgust,
Degraded mass of animated dust!
Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat,
Thy smiles hypocrisy, thy words deceit!
By nature vile, ennobled but by name,
Each kindred brute might bid thee blush for shame.
Ye! who perchance behold this simple urn,
Pass on - it honours none you wish to mourn.
To mark a friend's remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one, and here he lies.
SO SIMPLE THAT IT'S BRILLIANT!
Here's a solution from a concerned friend to all the controversy over full-body scanners at the airports. A booth that you can step into that will not X-ray you, but will detonate any explosive device you may have on you.
It would be a win-win for everyone, and there would be none of this argument about racial profiling. This method would eliminate a long and expensive trial. Justice would be quick and swift. Case closed!
That from reader Brian Hitchen. This from reader Chris Sheridan:
"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled.
Public debt should be reduced. The arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled. The assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance." Cicero - 55 BC. What have we learned in 2,065 years?
I came to instant indecision watching the "X Factor" in which three second-rate minds auditioned to become chief of the tribe but I decided not to intervene for another reason. A party of civil servants, anxious to set up the machinery of a hung parliament, decided to examine the system at work.
Five countries are prospering under balanced government. Our next door neighbour Scotland is an excellent example. Our mandarins with a glad cry set off for the sunny climes of New Zealand. It was hardly the shortest distance between two points. On arrival they were presented with a manual explaining how to build your own Balanced Parliament. Why didn't they have one sent in the post? Or indeed "tak' the High Road"? We are promised a new super clean parliament but it is patently too early to sell the trough.
In the event, it was the election everybody lost. Clegg committed Hari Kiri when he offered an amnesty to illegal immigrants. Neither of the other parties discussed the prospect of national bankruptcy, brought even nearer when the Dow Jones Index dropped a thousand points on Election Day. Not that it matters that nobody won. Whatever party is elected it will inevitably transmute into a Conservative government. I was tempted to vote Liberal but could not support a party desperate to take us into Europe with indecent haste and which believes in the discredited Euro. After a referendum, of course. I have leaned not to trust promises of referendums.
The most overworked image of the election was the Elephant in the Room. So many crowded into the electoral room I looked vain for Sabu, the Elephant Boy. I wouldn't have been surprised to find his merry little face. Among the experts who were lined up to be interviewed were Bruce Forsyth, Joan Collins, Piers Morgan, a drunken and aimless Amis and others too innumerate to mention. For intelligent comment and criticism there was only Bremner, Bird and Fortune.
Cameron's spectacular vote loser was the admission to Paxman that there would be major cuts in Nothern Ireland and the North East of England. The least offensive policies were those of the Labour party. Brown, a son of the Manse, may be an honest and caring man. He claims to be at every opportunity. His trouble is that he is unlucky and we know what Napoleon thought of unlucky generals. Blair beat him to the succession; when he scrambled into power we were immediately visited with foot and mouth disease (which may or may not be God reprising his trick with the Plagues of Egypt); he sold our Gold Reserves at the bottom of the market and laid the trail for our current problems. His continuing history is a sorry one. The gaff in Rochdale was unimportant. Everyone makes them and the voting public should have been warned when we learned Murdoch's Sun had offered the spurned widow £25,000 to put her name to rude remarks which were to be written for her by Sun employees.
I was at a St Leger dinner in Doncaster Guidhall when the chairman of the race committe Alderman Cammidge proferred Elizabeth II a tureen of vegetables with the words "Have some cabbage, Queen. It's good for the complexion."
Alas I was not present when the very regal Queen Mary rushed from the Royal Train on a visit to Peterloo to examine the royal convenience. As she emerged, a Mayor said sympathetically, "Your Majesty'll feel better for that."
That was never reported. Nor did I report the obscene language with which Prince Philip answered my polite query about his score in a Polo match in Little Budworth. And it would not have occured to me to report my exchanges with Aneurin Bevan.
After Brown's gaffe much was made of his efforts to find out who had included the bigoted widow in the people to whom he talked. The greater gaffe was the admission that the so-called random meetings politicians have are orchestrated by minions who pick the people who will shake hands days before a visit.
A noble friend of mine who is high in the Masonic Hierachy was loaned a Royal car to take him to a function where he was acting for an absent Royal. The car arrived at his house the day before and did a trial run of the entire journey, including comfort stops, lunch and tea breaks. When Princess Margaret subsequently stayed overnight with him he was even told the brand of lavaory tissue she preferred. Only a man as unlucky as Brown would find a woman who had not been vetted and rehearsed by his staff.
Personally I think the party which lost the most was the BBC. For tribal reaons I watched their coverage and was appalled. Millions of people watch Talent Spotting Contests: therefore, said the Suits, we must replace the election coverage with a General Entertainment. Rehearsed, of course, and worked from an agreed script. Unfortunately they got the timing wrong. The whole embarrassing performance began an hour early, long before the first result. The action was set in a studio dressed to represent the Star Ship Enterprise. Only Dr Spock and the delectable Lieutenant Uhuru were missing. For a very long hour the only bone they had to worry was a hypothetical poll. The studio toys would have been more at home in a Christmas store grotto. There was a virtual parliament with Alice in Wonderland dominoes and a swingometer which seemed to baffle its luckless operator. No point in criticising the Dimblebys: like the poorly talented they are always with us. They are there by virtue of being Dimblebys.
By any professional standard, the two "lions" Humphrys and Paxman and their cub Evan Davies were abysmal. They had no interviewing technique to speak of. They are so besotted with the game of politics they have become contestants themselves. The only subject which interested them was the prospect of an unbalanced parliament when the only balance the listeners wanted to hear about was balancing the books.
Byron's epitaph for his dog, Boatswain. Sent by reader Sarah Thomas, for which much thanks
"Near this spot Are deposited the Remains of one Who possessed Beauty without Vanity, Strength without Insolence, Courage without Ferocity, And all the Virtues of Man without his Vices. This Praise, which would be unmeaning Flattery If inscribed over human ashes, Is but a just tribute to the Memory of BOATSWAIN, a Dog, Who was born at Newfoundland, May, 1803, And died at Newstead Abbey, Nov. 18, 1808."
When some proud son of man returns to earth,
Unknown to glory, but upheld by birth,
The sculptor's art exhausts the pomp of woe,
And storied urns record who rests below;
When all is done, upon the tomb is seen
Not what he was but what he should have been.
But the poor dog, in life the firmest friend,
The first to welcome, foremost to defend,
Whose honest heart is all his master's own,
Who labours, fights, lives, breathes for him alone,
Unhonour'd falls, unnoticed all his worth,
Denied in heaven the soul he held on earth;
While man, vain insect! hopes to be forgiven,
And claims himself a sole exclusive heaven.
Oh man! thou feeble tenant of an hour,
Debased by slavery, or corrupt by power,
who knows thee well must quit thee with disgust,
Degraded mass of animated dust!
Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat,
Thy smiles hypocrisy, thy words deceit!
By nature vile, ennobled but by name,
Each kindred brute might bid thee blush for shame.
Ye! who perchance behold this simple urn,
Pass on - it honours none you wish to mourn.
To mark a friend's remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one, and here he lies.
SO SIMPLE THAT IT'S BRILLIANT!
Here's a solution from a concerned friend to all the controversy over full-body scanners at the airports. A booth that you can step into that will not X-ray you, but will detonate any explosive device you may have on you.
It would be a win-win for everyone, and there would be none of this argument about racial profiling. This method would eliminate a long and expensive trial. Justice would be quick and swift. Case closed!
That from reader Brian Hitchen. This from reader Chris Sheridan:
"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled.
Public debt should be reduced. The arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled. The assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance." Cicero - 55 BC. What have we learned in 2,065 years?
Saturday, 1 May 2010
The White Man Burdened
A Muslim who defaced a war memorial with the words “Islam Will Rule the World” walks free. The internet overflows with warnings that the Western World will be up to its gunwales in Muslims. Might my dream in last week's blog, our invasion by an innumerate Amazonian tribe, come true?
The internet warnings are intended to frighten. And they do. No one can view with equanimity the loss of our tribal customs, can they? Towns, even cities, drowned in an alien cultural tsunami must upset us, must it not?
Well, no. Not really. I do not feel any of that.
At my age I do not even have to worry which party wins the next election.The coming bankruptcy of Britain is of no concern. I am not even worried at having to suffer another Christmas. Whatever age one lives to, one dies at 78. After 78 nothing matters beyond personal comfort and selfish gratification. One is armoured against disappointment, untroubled by hope. On TV I will watch anything, or equally happily miss anything. Only three thing matter. Breakfast, lunch and supper. Diets? Let those who will carry the coffin worry about my weight. Breakfast for me now is Overfull English; lunch, substantial; supper, a pint of home made soup.
Many years ago I lived in an isolated manor house, Picton Hall, alone save for a housekeeper and miles from any shops. I was dismayed that no newsagent would undertake the daily safari. In consequence, I was forced to get my newspapers by post, a day late. In those days we seemed to have daily crises.They all missed me. By the time my paper arrived they were over.
So let the muezzin ring. Bring on Sharia law. I will take as little notice of it as I have over the past 80 years of the Western variety.
I remember how envious I was in his last days of Frank Sinatra. Whilst, in his house, his unattractive family squabbled over his riches, he sat by his pool, unconcerned, happily eating endless ice cream. In my case, substitute the ice cream with my Sony E Book and visualise a rather smaller pool. You will find me in sparkling mid-season form. Even secretly amused that the West has been hoist by its own petard. Do as you would be done by? In a mad craving for land and riches, we not only wiped out the tribal customs and faiths of the lands we invaded: we wiped out the tribes.
I have been led down these interesting by-ways by two books. The first, a novel “Manta Yo”, an account of a year in the life of a Dakotah Sioux tribe written by an American scholar, Ruth Beebe Hill. To make it authentic she asked a Dakotah-born academic to translate it into archaic Dakotah and then back into English with no loss of tribal idiom. The result is a haunting book which tells the story of a benign and ordered nomad society where the power is structured from the grandfathers to a council drawn from elected tribal members. Boys leave their mothers at the age of ten, to be instructed in manhood by their fathers. Even hunting the buffalo is controlled so that the herds are never depleted. It was an ancient society which US Government policy, aided by preachers, destroyed in one man's lifetime. Britain invaded China expressly to flood that country with opium. No wonder someone said “The reason the sun never sets on the British Empire is that you cannot trust the British in the dark.”
In India the destroyer was the East India Company. William Dalrymple's book “The Last Mughal” shows that company at its worst. The last emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar 11 was a serious mystical poet, a calligrapher and a creator of gardens. He presided over a society of cultured poets, painters and musicians. His ancestors had ruled most of India but by the time he came to the throne most of it was annexed by the Company and his kingdom was reduced to the city of Delhi. After the Indian mutiny, which he had headed unwillingly after his city was occupied by the mutineers, Delhi was flattened, its inhabitants made homeless. The Royal Family was wiped out like an eastern Lidice. Emperor Zafar spent the rest of his short life in prison, known only as Prisoner Number One. The glory that was the Mughal Empire ended in an unmarked grave.
Though we tried hard in Africa, no other Western power could equal the monstrous rule of Leopold of the Belgians who treated the Congo as his private estate. He turned his "Congo Free State" into a massive labour camp, made a fortune for himself from the harvest of its wild rubber, and contributed in a large way to the death of perhaps 10 million innocent people. Children and adults had right hands hacked off by his agents.The agents kept the hands to prove to their superiors that they had not been "wasting" their bullets on animals.
Add our betrayal of the entire Arab race when we stole their country at Versailles and remember Edmund Burke. He said that those who failed to profit by history ended up repeating it, or, as Justin Timberlake sings, “What goes around comes around”.
PRINCESS WHO DRANK FROM JAM JARS
Most people agree it would be a waste of money to buy a new Trident. But come to think of it, so was buying the old one. My chum Lady Williams said Russians talk a good war but they are too lazy to start one and usually win by fighting as little as possible, leaving the Russian winter as a killing machine. It certainly worked with Napoleon and Hitler.
Masha Williams was a Russian princess. One of her ancestors started a revolution in Russia in the 19th century which meant that though her family fled to Britain in 1916 in fear of their lives, she was given the Soviet equivalent of a red carpet on frequent returns to that country. At the end of the war she was appointed Chief Interpreter to Red Army High Command in Vienna when it was run by the Four Powers. She always said that the Cold War was largely the resut of the snobbish way the British treated the Russians.
Masha's family had lived in abject poverty when they arrived in Britain. From owning estates which stretched from horizon to horizon they found themselves drinking from jam jars, seated on orange boxes. Her mother told her father he would have to get a job.
“A job? I cannot do anything except be a prince."
“You can be a servant. We have had enough; you must know what they do.”
A neighbour told them where to look for jobs and in the newspaper he loaned them
they saw a vacancy for a butler.
Masha's father went round to the house. To the front door, of course, because the concept of a tradesman's entrance was foreign to him. The maid who answered the door assumed he was a luncheon guest and showed him into the drawing room.
He assumed this was the way the British interviewed servants and set out to charm everyone in sight. He succeeded so brilliantly that no one liked to ask who he was.
Over coffee, Masha's dad thought it time he asked about the job.
The family was shocked. "We couldn't employ YOU," his host said when he learned the prince's story. "We aren't grand enough. But I would be honoured to be your friend."
It was the end of their poverty. The luncheon host gave the family an allowance and paid for the education of the children at public schools. Masha won an Oxford scholarship, married an ambassador and lived happily ever after. In her retirement she wrote three books about her life in Vienna and subsequent ambassadorial postings. They are at my bedside as I write.
The internet warnings are intended to frighten. And they do. No one can view with equanimity the loss of our tribal customs, can they? Towns, even cities, drowned in an alien cultural tsunami must upset us, must it not?
Well, no. Not really. I do not feel any of that.
At my age I do not even have to worry which party wins the next election.The coming bankruptcy of Britain is of no concern. I am not even worried at having to suffer another Christmas. Whatever age one lives to, one dies at 78. After 78 nothing matters beyond personal comfort and selfish gratification. One is armoured against disappointment, untroubled by hope. On TV I will watch anything, or equally happily miss anything. Only three thing matter. Breakfast, lunch and supper. Diets? Let those who will carry the coffin worry about my weight. Breakfast for me now is Overfull English; lunch, substantial; supper, a pint of home made soup.
Many years ago I lived in an isolated manor house, Picton Hall, alone save for a housekeeper and miles from any shops. I was dismayed that no newsagent would undertake the daily safari. In consequence, I was forced to get my newspapers by post, a day late. In those days we seemed to have daily crises.They all missed me. By the time my paper arrived they were over.
So let the muezzin ring. Bring on Sharia law. I will take as little notice of it as I have over the past 80 years of the Western variety.
I remember how envious I was in his last days of Frank Sinatra. Whilst, in his house, his unattractive family squabbled over his riches, he sat by his pool, unconcerned, happily eating endless ice cream. In my case, substitute the ice cream with my Sony E Book and visualise a rather smaller pool. You will find me in sparkling mid-season form. Even secretly amused that the West has been hoist by its own petard. Do as you would be done by? In a mad craving for land and riches, we not only wiped out the tribal customs and faiths of the lands we invaded: we wiped out the tribes.
I have been led down these interesting by-ways by two books. The first, a novel “Manta Yo”, an account of a year in the life of a Dakotah Sioux tribe written by an American scholar, Ruth Beebe Hill. To make it authentic she asked a Dakotah-born academic to translate it into archaic Dakotah and then back into English with no loss of tribal idiom. The result is a haunting book which tells the story of a benign and ordered nomad society where the power is structured from the grandfathers to a council drawn from elected tribal members. Boys leave their mothers at the age of ten, to be instructed in manhood by their fathers. Even hunting the buffalo is controlled so that the herds are never depleted. It was an ancient society which US Government policy, aided by preachers, destroyed in one man's lifetime. Britain invaded China expressly to flood that country with opium. No wonder someone said “The reason the sun never sets on the British Empire is that you cannot trust the British in the dark.”
In India the destroyer was the East India Company. William Dalrymple's book “The Last Mughal” shows that company at its worst. The last emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar 11 was a serious mystical poet, a calligrapher and a creator of gardens. He presided over a society of cultured poets, painters and musicians. His ancestors had ruled most of India but by the time he came to the throne most of it was annexed by the Company and his kingdom was reduced to the city of Delhi. After the Indian mutiny, which he had headed unwillingly after his city was occupied by the mutineers, Delhi was flattened, its inhabitants made homeless. The Royal Family was wiped out like an eastern Lidice. Emperor Zafar spent the rest of his short life in prison, known only as Prisoner Number One. The glory that was the Mughal Empire ended in an unmarked grave.
Though we tried hard in Africa, no other Western power could equal the monstrous rule of Leopold of the Belgians who treated the Congo as his private estate. He turned his "Congo Free State" into a massive labour camp, made a fortune for himself from the harvest of its wild rubber, and contributed in a large way to the death of perhaps 10 million innocent people. Children and adults had right hands hacked off by his agents.The agents kept the hands to prove to their superiors that they had not been "wasting" their bullets on animals.
Add our betrayal of the entire Arab race when we stole their country at Versailles and remember Edmund Burke. He said that those who failed to profit by history ended up repeating it, or, as Justin Timberlake sings, “What goes around comes around”.
PRINCESS WHO DRANK FROM JAM JARS
Most people agree it would be a waste of money to buy a new Trident. But come to think of it, so was buying the old one. My chum Lady Williams said Russians talk a good war but they are too lazy to start one and usually win by fighting as little as possible, leaving the Russian winter as a killing machine. It certainly worked with Napoleon and Hitler.
Masha Williams was a Russian princess. One of her ancestors started a revolution in Russia in the 19th century which meant that though her family fled to Britain in 1916 in fear of their lives, she was given the Soviet equivalent of a red carpet on frequent returns to that country. At the end of the war she was appointed Chief Interpreter to Red Army High Command in Vienna when it was run by the Four Powers. She always said that the Cold War was largely the resut of the snobbish way the British treated the Russians.
Masha's family had lived in abject poverty when they arrived in Britain. From owning estates which stretched from horizon to horizon they found themselves drinking from jam jars, seated on orange boxes. Her mother told her father he would have to get a job.
“A job? I cannot do anything except be a prince."
“You can be a servant. We have had enough; you must know what they do.”
A neighbour told them where to look for jobs and in the newspaper he loaned them
they saw a vacancy for a butler.
Masha's father went round to the house. To the front door, of course, because the concept of a tradesman's entrance was foreign to him. The maid who answered the door assumed he was a luncheon guest and showed him into the drawing room.
He assumed this was the way the British interviewed servants and set out to charm everyone in sight. He succeeded so brilliantly that no one liked to ask who he was.
Over coffee, Masha's dad thought it time he asked about the job.
The family was shocked. "We couldn't employ YOU," his host said when he learned the prince's story. "We aren't grand enough. But I would be honoured to be your friend."
It was the end of their poverty. The luncheon host gave the family an allowance and paid for the education of the children at public schools. Masha won an Oxford scholarship, married an ambassador and lived happily ever after. In her retirement she wrote three books about her life in Vienna and subsequent ambassadorial postings. They are at my bedside as I write.
Friday, 23 April 2010
IN WHICH DOG IS SPELLED BACKWARDS
What is so special about the human race? Put a dog anywhere in the world and he can communicate fluently with his own species; and other species too I shouldn't be surprised. Move me 25 miles across the channel and they are all talking gobbledy gook.
No other species kills fifteen million of its kind in a Holocaust, a million in Rwanda, two million in splitting its habitat in two as in India at Partition. Other species respect territories. They don't destroy the nests of strangers out of evil intent as we did in Guernica and Dresden. I have never felt more ashamed of my kind than I did touring Germany immediately after World War 2.
No other species has set out deliberately to destroy its neighbours as we did the American Indian, the Maori and the Australian aborigine. For two hundred years we have been trekking the wilder shores of the world teaching simple natives fraud on a massive scale, greed and sophisticated means of killing; and forcing on them a new dubious religion peopled with fairytale characters.
How much better if the jungle tribes had invaded and converted us.
I long for an invasion by the Munduruku, an indigenous group of about 7,000 people in the Brazilian Amazon whose language has no tenses, no plurals and no words for numbers beyond five. A Parisian explorer/scientist Pivare Pica who visited them admitted:
"When I come back from Amazonia, I find I have lost all sense of time and sense of number, and perhaps sense of space." He had spent so long with people who can barely count that he had lost the ability to describe the world in terms of numbers.
No one knows for certain, but numbers are probably no more than about 10,000 years old. They probably emerged as a tool for making sure you were not ripped off.
Pica easily slipped into a numberless existence. He slept in a hammock. He went hunting and ate tapir, armadillo and wild boar. He told the time from the position of the sun. If it rained, he stayed in; if it was sunny, he went out. There was never any need to count.
The Munduruku did not count a first child, a second, third, fourth and fifth, and then scratch the head because they could go no further. Why would a Munduruku adult want to count his children? They are looked after by all the adults in the community. No one counts who belongs to whom.
Evelyn Waugh was in favour of the neutron bomb which destroyed people but left the artefacts of their civilisations. Alas, I have always thought of civilisation as an oxymoron.
In his breathtaking TV series on the stars around us, Tele Don Professor Brian Cox explained that below the ice that covers Europa, Jupiter's moon, is an ocean a hundred miles deep which teems with the microbes that are our ultimate ancestors. The thought that they may be packing for the long journey to becoming us is Gothic in its horror.
A number of respectable religions share the Taoist belief that all sentient beings are part of one mind, whose life is never ending. Hermes, the Attic philosopher, said that God was a circle the centre of which is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.
When the Moravian missionaries sought to convert the Indians to their Grimms' Fairy Tale, the Indians told them: “We Indians shall not forever die. Even the grains of corn we put under the earth grow up and become living things.”
The Missionary added: “They conceive that when the soul has been alive with God it can, if it chooses, return to earth and be born again.”
That explains child prodigies like Mozart, which is comforting. Less comforting is the evidence that we never learn, no matter how many times we come back and slip into something corporeal. We may remember how to write music and poetry and paint pictures. But somewhere in the luggage is hate and greed and treachery.
EVEN OUR PETS ARE FAMOUS.................
The bloodhound Druid, and the cats Marmaduke and Scarper, in my wife's books are all based on our pets. The recurring heroine in the books was Miss Kip, a lurcher.
When she came to us we called her Miss Kip because that is all she ever did. If we had waited a week we would have called her Miss Slash because she was forever soaking carpets. As happens with pets, the void she left when she died was wider and deeper than the space she took up in life.
She was never much success as a lurcher. She was probably the only greyhound in Wales who was afraid of rabbits. When she was young she killed one by accident and I will never forget the look of shame and remorse she gave me.
She was good at looking at you with huge, luminous, speaking eyes. When she was a pup she was trapped by the tricky tide in the Menai Strait. As the water round her rose at lightning speed she sat calmly on a sand island and looked at me confidently across the swirling waters, waiting for me to remove them. By the time I got her back the water was up to my neck but the biggest risk of drowning was from the wet licks she gave me.
When she was young she walked as though suspended by invisible wire. Her feet barely touched the ground. When she was old and stiff she walked like John Wayne.
There is a poem by Melanie Elliot which describes her perfectly:
"Gracefully coursing the level ground,
"She stretches her limbs to the final bound.
"Effortless movement, perfection in speed,
"And elegant power are the greyhound's creed.
"She is Ariel's hound, a gift from the Gods."
This morning, remembering her, I have been reminded that what the gods give, they also take away.
NUFF SAID
I think it no coincidence that we now have TV talent contests for the job of prime minister with Nick Clegg in the John Sargent role. For weeks commentators have been pointing out how more readily the lumpen proletariat vote in talent contests than general elections. The “Britain's Got Talkers” slavishly followed its sires. Pastel walls, desk of the performer judge. We even have electronic vote counters and weekly winners. The three contestants have back up teams of coaches whose advice they follow slavishly. I have no doubt the election will be affected with Nick Clegg as a winsome Susan Boyle.
Had he moved before the volcano dust settled Brown could have won the election at a hand canter. One word would have done it:
DUNKIRK.
Didn't need armies of PR experts, complicated negotiations, dithering over weather conditions. But it wasn't until Sunday that cabinet members began to murmur about getting the navy involved. For me, this final proof that politicians do not care was the final straw.
I am tired of the sound of snake-oil salesmen yelping hysterically as they squabble over places in the trough. No more news bulletins, newsnights, and I will open my newspaper at page 7 to avoid the epilepsy of elections.
Fending off the door canvassers is not as easy. When I had Picton Hall there was a tradesmen's entrance and Mrs Higgs, the housekeeper, used to reroute canvassers. At Aberbraint the long drive and a couple of bloodhounds deterred. Now we have downsized we are open to assault. I think to pin to the front door Lady Raleigh's denunciation in a letter to Sir Robert Cecil who sought the head of her husband:
“Every month has its flower and every season his contentment, but you great counsellors are so full of new counsels as are steady in nothing.”
FOR THIS RELIEF MUCH THANKS
I am inbebted to Revel Barker for some saisfying therapy.
Cut, paste and click on the link below:
http://ow.ly/1vxjX
EARNEST, THE POLICEMEN (with apologies to Toytown)
Our policemen in the Fens are amiable on the whole and interfere as little as possible with the people around them, even those citizens who are crying out for interference. It is perhaps as well.
Armed policemen (a phrase which always chills me to the bone) surrounded a pensioner's bungalow here in March and ordered the occupants to come out with their hands up. The occupants came out with all the alacrity of which they were capable. They couldn't put their hands up. If they had taken them off their zimmer frames they would have fallen over.
A carer had reported that the very elderly man who lived in the bungalow with his wife had told the carer he had a gun. A response would have been to send a community policeman round to make a few enquiries. A pal of mine, Bob Talbot, disguised himself as a milkman and arrested the Moors Murderers on his own. But our brave boys in blue and body armour were not to be balked. In what sounds like a fit of pique, they have confiscated an air gun which the old man was legally entitled to own. Indeed with scrupulous fairness they admitted he could go out and buy another. But so far they have not given him his old gun back.
No other species kills fifteen million of its kind in a Holocaust, a million in Rwanda, two million in splitting its habitat in two as in India at Partition. Other species respect territories. They don't destroy the nests of strangers out of evil intent as we did in Guernica and Dresden. I have never felt more ashamed of my kind than I did touring Germany immediately after World War 2.
No other species has set out deliberately to destroy its neighbours as we did the American Indian, the Maori and the Australian aborigine. For two hundred years we have been trekking the wilder shores of the world teaching simple natives fraud on a massive scale, greed and sophisticated means of killing; and forcing on them a new dubious religion peopled with fairytale characters.
How much better if the jungle tribes had invaded and converted us.
I long for an invasion by the Munduruku, an indigenous group of about 7,000 people in the Brazilian Amazon whose language has no tenses, no plurals and no words for numbers beyond five. A Parisian explorer/scientist Pivare Pica who visited them admitted:
"When I come back from Amazonia, I find I have lost all sense of time and sense of number, and perhaps sense of space." He had spent so long with people who can barely count that he had lost the ability to describe the world in terms of numbers.
No one knows for certain, but numbers are probably no more than about 10,000 years old. They probably emerged as a tool for making sure you were not ripped off.
Pica easily slipped into a numberless existence. He slept in a hammock. He went hunting and ate tapir, armadillo and wild boar. He told the time from the position of the sun. If it rained, he stayed in; if it was sunny, he went out. There was never any need to count.
The Munduruku did not count a first child, a second, third, fourth and fifth, and then scratch the head because they could go no further. Why would a Munduruku adult want to count his children? They are looked after by all the adults in the community. No one counts who belongs to whom.
Evelyn Waugh was in favour of the neutron bomb which destroyed people but left the artefacts of their civilisations. Alas, I have always thought of civilisation as an oxymoron.
In his breathtaking TV series on the stars around us, Tele Don Professor Brian Cox explained that below the ice that covers Europa, Jupiter's moon, is an ocean a hundred miles deep which teems with the microbes that are our ultimate ancestors. The thought that they may be packing for the long journey to becoming us is Gothic in its horror.
A number of respectable religions share the Taoist belief that all sentient beings are part of one mind, whose life is never ending. Hermes, the Attic philosopher, said that God was a circle the centre of which is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.
When the Moravian missionaries sought to convert the Indians to their Grimms' Fairy Tale, the Indians told them: “We Indians shall not forever die. Even the grains of corn we put under the earth grow up and become living things.”
The Missionary added: “They conceive that when the soul has been alive with God it can, if it chooses, return to earth and be born again.”
That explains child prodigies like Mozart, which is comforting. Less comforting is the evidence that we never learn, no matter how many times we come back and slip into something corporeal. We may remember how to write music and poetry and paint pictures. But somewhere in the luggage is hate and greed and treachery.
EVEN OUR PETS ARE FAMOUS.................
The bloodhound Druid, and the cats Marmaduke and Scarper, in my wife's books are all based on our pets. The recurring heroine in the books was Miss Kip, a lurcher.
When she came to us we called her Miss Kip because that is all she ever did. If we had waited a week we would have called her Miss Slash because she was forever soaking carpets. As happens with pets, the void she left when she died was wider and deeper than the space she took up in life.
She was never much success as a lurcher. She was probably the only greyhound in Wales who was afraid of rabbits. When she was young she killed one by accident and I will never forget the look of shame and remorse she gave me.
She was good at looking at you with huge, luminous, speaking eyes. When she was a pup she was trapped by the tricky tide in the Menai Strait. As the water round her rose at lightning speed she sat calmly on a sand island and looked at me confidently across the swirling waters, waiting for me to remove them. By the time I got her back the water was up to my neck but the biggest risk of drowning was from the wet licks she gave me.
When she was young she walked as though suspended by invisible wire. Her feet barely touched the ground. When she was old and stiff she walked like John Wayne.
There is a poem by Melanie Elliot which describes her perfectly:
"Gracefully coursing the level ground,
"She stretches her limbs to the final bound.
"Effortless movement, perfection in speed,
"And elegant power are the greyhound's creed.
"She is Ariel's hound, a gift from the Gods."
This morning, remembering her, I have been reminded that what the gods give, they also take away.
NUFF SAID
I think it no coincidence that we now have TV talent contests for the job of prime minister with Nick Clegg in the John Sargent role. For weeks commentators have been pointing out how more readily the lumpen proletariat vote in talent contests than general elections. The “Britain's Got Talkers” slavishly followed its sires. Pastel walls, desk of the performer judge. We even have electronic vote counters and weekly winners. The three contestants have back up teams of coaches whose advice they follow slavishly. I have no doubt the election will be affected with Nick Clegg as a winsome Susan Boyle.
Had he moved before the volcano dust settled Brown could have won the election at a hand canter. One word would have done it:
DUNKIRK.
Didn't need armies of PR experts, complicated negotiations, dithering over weather conditions. But it wasn't until Sunday that cabinet members began to murmur about getting the navy involved. For me, this final proof that politicians do not care was the final straw.
I am tired of the sound of snake-oil salesmen yelping hysterically as they squabble over places in the trough. No more news bulletins, newsnights, and I will open my newspaper at page 7 to avoid the epilepsy of elections.
Fending off the door canvassers is not as easy. When I had Picton Hall there was a tradesmen's entrance and Mrs Higgs, the housekeeper, used to reroute canvassers. At Aberbraint the long drive and a couple of bloodhounds deterred. Now we have downsized we are open to assault. I think to pin to the front door Lady Raleigh's denunciation in a letter to Sir Robert Cecil who sought the head of her husband:
“Every month has its flower and every season his contentment, but you great counsellors are so full of new counsels as are steady in nothing.”
FOR THIS RELIEF MUCH THANKS
I am inbebted to Revel Barker for some saisfying therapy.
Cut, paste and click on the link below:
http://ow.ly/1vxjX
EARNEST, THE POLICEMEN (with apologies to Toytown)
Our policemen in the Fens are amiable on the whole and interfere as little as possible with the people around them, even those citizens who are crying out for interference. It is perhaps as well.
Armed policemen (a phrase which always chills me to the bone) surrounded a pensioner's bungalow here in March and ordered the occupants to come out with their hands up. The occupants came out with all the alacrity of which they were capable. They couldn't put their hands up. If they had taken them off their zimmer frames they would have fallen over.
A carer had reported that the very elderly man who lived in the bungalow with his wife had told the carer he had a gun. A response would have been to send a community policeman round to make a few enquiries. A pal of mine, Bob Talbot, disguised himself as a milkman and arrested the Moors Murderers on his own. But our brave boys in blue and body armour were not to be balked. In what sounds like a fit of pique, they have confiscated an air gun which the old man was legally entitled to own. Indeed with scrupulous fairness they admitted he could go out and buy another. But so far they have not given him his old gun back.
Saturday, 17 April 2010
A HEARSE,A HEARSE, MY KINGDOM FOR A HEARSE...................
My wife celebrated the Grand National by backing the first three fallers. The only cause for surprise is that her betting slip has not so far won a literary prize.
Everything else she writes seems to attract them like flies.
The Arts Council of Wales awarded her the Irma Chilton prize and four thousand crisp oncers for her contribution to children's literature. Her first book, Steel Town Cats, won the Tir na n-Og, the premier award for children's fiction in
Wales. For “The Terrible Tale of Tiggy Two” I fully expected her to get a Life Peerage in the Birthday Honours List.
If you think I am boasting, forget it. I am complaining. I have written eighteen books on topics ranging from Welsh history and outstanding Welshmen to Japanese prisoner of war camps. I have written comic novels, after which I was described as the heir to Tom Sharpe, historic novels, an "hilarious autobiography" - according to the Daily Post - topographical books, and I've edited an anthology of prose and poetry. Not even a Mention in Despatches.
I wouldn't care but it's so embarrassing at Census time when they send round that form and you have to list qualifications and awards. Hers kicks off with Master of Arts (Oxon), then lists her glittering prizes. Me? Certificate 'A', Part One, for proficiency in assembling a bren gun.
Would you like to go through life as a mock-Denis Thatcher?
Even he was better off. At least he had a famous name.
Celia writes under her maiden name, Lucas.
.........................
ENTITLED
No one has as many titles as my old chum Gwyn L Williams, Head Honcho of Olympic Cultural Events in Wales: Chief executive of Llangollen International Eisteddfod, a Lt Governor (Hon) of Oklahoma, choir conductor, visiting professor at seven universities, senior BBC Music producer, composer, Director of Theatr Harlech.
Gwyn L was Musical Director of the 150-voice, century-old Liverpool Welsh Choral Union. He also directed Cantorion Menai, a 40-voice chamber choir, and the Montgomeryshire Festival Chorus, an amalgam of four choirs. He was in addition guest conductor of the five choirs which amalgamate annually as the Dee and Clwyd Festival Chorus.
He has blown his own trumpet too. There was a time when he blew a mean horn with the London and Liverpool Philharmonic orchestras, the London and Festival Ballet orchestras and the BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra.
Power mad?
“Oh no,” he told me when I once taxed him with it. “If you want a sense of power in music, blow a trumpet. You can bring an orchestra to its knees any time you like. You just play loud.
“The disadvantage is that a trumpet cannot have dialogues with other instruments. It is a primary colour, primeval even. A conductor can have these dialogues. By gesture and eye contact you suggest to your oboeist a particular way of doing things. Sometimes he will do exactly as you wanted, others he will start going off along a route of his own. It’s very difficult to explain because it all happens in a microcosm of time. You may think ‘Oh, that is good’ and allow him to travel. Or you bring him back because you control the orchestra and you don’t allow him space.
“Physically, conducting is very demanding. We rehearse for about ten weeks. Final rehearsal is about three hours, followed by a three-hour concert. The morning after I feel as though I have been run over by an elephant.”
And so many choirs?
“My job was to make ordinary people sing. It has taken me a long time to learn it and I am just beginning to get over being frightened. You know what you want but you wonder, until the concert begins, whether you can deliver.
“A conductor must know every single note in the score. You cannot stand in front of two hundred people without knowing more about the music than they do. For The Dream of Gerontius I took two weeks off. I spent six or seven hours a day reading the score.
“You don’t have to mouth the words when you read a book. In the same way you hear the music in your mind. It is communicating to me in the sounds that are coming off the page. It is also communicating spiritually.
“What I have to do in rehearsal is to listen to what I am getting in my head and try to change the physical presence of the music from the choir until it gets as close as humanly possible to my concept of it.
“In performance you use the bricks you have made in rehearsal and build a house with them. Nothing is perfect but sometimes you know you have got it right. You cannot will it to happen. Indeed, it has only happened to me half a dozen times in ten years. Suddenly you feel connected to the composer, to the musicians and to the audience. Everything you are suggesting to the players and the singers comes back and is funnelled through you to the audience.
“You cease to be an individual. Something takes you over. It happened when the Liverpool Welsh Choir, the Welsh Chamber Orchestra and Cantorion Menai did Faure’s Requiem y in Bangor Cathedral. Again in Porgy and Bess in Montgomery. It has happened in The Messiah with the Liverpool Welsh a couple of times.
“Music never leaves you alone. I have no life outside it. Music is what I am. My favourite piece of music? The one I am conducting at the time. You fall in love with a piece of music. It is like a relationship. It consumes you completely. You can be talking to somebody and it is like having music on in the background of your mind.
“Musical ambition? To get better at what I am doing. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than working at a single piece with a group of people for a couple of months, then putting it together on the day with another group of musicians who have come in specially, and delivering it. If I can do all that and make sure everyone has a happy day I have achieved my ambition.
“We are living in a musical golden age. British musicians have a worldwide reputation for their ability to read a piece and perform it straight away. Choral societies are the great enablers. They enable orchestras to exist. But I wonder what the future is.
“We have wonderful choirs and musicians because of the policy of the sixties and the seventies when peripatetic teachers taught music in schools. That system has been dismantled, so, give it another twenty years, and I don’t know where we will be.”
I will take short odds on one Olympic event. It is just a case of which Welsh choir it will be.
BLAIR-FACED
Sarah Palin's demands included: first or business-class travel, or a private jet no smaller than a Lear 60; two bottles of water at the lectern with bendable straws; and pre-screened questions.
There are plenty of people, apparently, willing to give in to Palin's demands: she's made at least $12 million since resigning as governor of Alaska. -- ABC News
Everything else she writes seems to attract them like flies.
The Arts Council of Wales awarded her the Irma Chilton prize and four thousand crisp oncers for her contribution to children's literature. Her first book, Steel Town Cats, won the Tir na n-Og, the premier award for children's fiction in
Wales. For “The Terrible Tale of Tiggy Two” I fully expected her to get a Life Peerage in the Birthday Honours List.
If you think I am boasting, forget it. I am complaining. I have written eighteen books on topics ranging from Welsh history and outstanding Welshmen to Japanese prisoner of war camps. I have written comic novels, after which I was described as the heir to Tom Sharpe, historic novels, an "hilarious autobiography" - according to the Daily Post - topographical books, and I've edited an anthology of prose and poetry. Not even a Mention in Despatches.
I wouldn't care but it's so embarrassing at Census time when they send round that form and you have to list qualifications and awards. Hers kicks off with Master of Arts (Oxon), then lists her glittering prizes. Me? Certificate 'A', Part One, for proficiency in assembling a bren gun.
Would you like to go through life as a mock-Denis Thatcher?
Even he was better off. At least he had a famous name.
Celia writes under her maiden name, Lucas.
.........................
ENTITLED
No one has as many titles as my old chum Gwyn L Williams, Head Honcho of Olympic Cultural Events in Wales: Chief executive of Llangollen International Eisteddfod, a Lt Governor (Hon) of Oklahoma, choir conductor, visiting professor at seven universities, senior BBC Music producer, composer, Director of Theatr Harlech.
Gwyn L was Musical Director of the 150-voice, century-old Liverpool Welsh Choral Union. He also directed Cantorion Menai, a 40-voice chamber choir, and the Montgomeryshire Festival Chorus, an amalgam of four choirs. He was in addition guest conductor of the five choirs which amalgamate annually as the Dee and Clwyd Festival Chorus.
He has blown his own trumpet too. There was a time when he blew a mean horn with the London and Liverpool Philharmonic orchestras, the London and Festival Ballet orchestras and the BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra.
Power mad?
“Oh no,” he told me when I once taxed him with it. “If you want a sense of power in music, blow a trumpet. You can bring an orchestra to its knees any time you like. You just play loud.
“The disadvantage is that a trumpet cannot have dialogues with other instruments. It is a primary colour, primeval even. A conductor can have these dialogues. By gesture and eye contact you suggest to your oboeist a particular way of doing things. Sometimes he will do exactly as you wanted, others he will start going off along a route of his own. It’s very difficult to explain because it all happens in a microcosm of time. You may think ‘Oh, that is good’ and allow him to travel. Or you bring him back because you control the orchestra and you don’t allow him space.
“Physically, conducting is very demanding. We rehearse for about ten weeks. Final rehearsal is about three hours, followed by a three-hour concert. The morning after I feel as though I have been run over by an elephant.”
And so many choirs?
“My job was to make ordinary people sing. It has taken me a long time to learn it and I am just beginning to get over being frightened. You know what you want but you wonder, until the concert begins, whether you can deliver.
“A conductor must know every single note in the score. You cannot stand in front of two hundred people without knowing more about the music than they do. For The Dream of Gerontius I took two weeks off. I spent six or seven hours a day reading the score.
“You don’t have to mouth the words when you read a book. In the same way you hear the music in your mind. It is communicating to me in the sounds that are coming off the page. It is also communicating spiritually.
“What I have to do in rehearsal is to listen to what I am getting in my head and try to change the physical presence of the music from the choir until it gets as close as humanly possible to my concept of it.
“In performance you use the bricks you have made in rehearsal and build a house with them. Nothing is perfect but sometimes you know you have got it right. You cannot will it to happen. Indeed, it has only happened to me half a dozen times in ten years. Suddenly you feel connected to the composer, to the musicians and to the audience. Everything you are suggesting to the players and the singers comes back and is funnelled through you to the audience.
“You cease to be an individual. Something takes you over. It happened when the Liverpool Welsh Choir, the Welsh Chamber Orchestra and Cantorion Menai did Faure’s Requiem y in Bangor Cathedral. Again in Porgy and Bess in Montgomery. It has happened in The Messiah with the Liverpool Welsh a couple of times.
“Music never leaves you alone. I have no life outside it. Music is what I am. My favourite piece of music? The one I am conducting at the time. You fall in love with a piece of music. It is like a relationship. It consumes you completely. You can be talking to somebody and it is like having music on in the background of your mind.
“Musical ambition? To get better at what I am doing. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than working at a single piece with a group of people for a couple of months, then putting it together on the day with another group of musicians who have come in specially, and delivering it. If I can do all that and make sure everyone has a happy day I have achieved my ambition.
“We are living in a musical golden age. British musicians have a worldwide reputation for their ability to read a piece and perform it straight away. Choral societies are the great enablers. They enable orchestras to exist. But I wonder what the future is.
“We have wonderful choirs and musicians because of the policy of the sixties and the seventies when peripatetic teachers taught music in schools. That system has been dismantled, so, give it another twenty years, and I don’t know where we will be.”
I will take short odds on one Olympic event. It is just a case of which Welsh choir it will be.
BLAIR-FACED
Sarah Palin's demands included: first or business-class travel, or a private jet no smaller than a Lear 60; two bottles of water at the lectern with bendable straws; and pre-screened questions.
There are plenty of people, apparently, willing to give in to Palin's demands: she's made at least $12 million since resigning as governor of Alaska. -- ABC News
Saturday, 10 April 2010
NOT THAT OLD SWEET SONG.............
Whatever the American Songbook may say it is not Georgia I have on MY mind. It is Bethesda. What Mandalay was to Kipling, the rose red city Petra to the Rev John William Burgon, Xanadu to Coleridge, Samarkand to Flecker...
So to me is Bethesda, Gwynedd.
If I were a stranger on my way to Snowdon I doubt if I would get past the Brittania Inn on the far frontier of that magic town, where, long after decimalization, you paid for your beer in pounds, shilling and pence.
It was an inn whose landlord and lady produced one of the truly great child organ playing prodigies of our day. Where shopkeepers met weekly to discuss philosophy, under the chairmanship of a cobbler. The only cobbler I have ever come across, I may say, who had a classical bookshop in the rooms above his last.
A town with one main street and two secondhand bookshops is unusual, even in this land of scholars. Bethesda had two. The Morrises, who ran the other one, are probably the only antiquarian book dealers who also ran a top West End drinking club for gangsters. They were certainly the only council tax payers in Bethesda who retired there from a Mediterranean villa.
What other small town has had a scholar of international repute and an Oxbridge Emeritus professor of Celtic Studies (Idris Foster and Rachel Bromwich) living in the same terrace of houses?
Where else are all the pubs on the same side of the street because the man who owned the other side was a teetotaller?
Bethesda is not beautiful. It is the colour of slate, living proof of the notion that in Wales beauty is received through the ear and not the eye. A sad symphony in stucco, the Welsh teracotta. Yet it is the home of that great painter of mountains David Woodford, the only artist to sell more than a hundred paintings in an exhibition. One of the few men to scale the Snowdon peaks in a Robin Reliant.
Readers of a literary bent will recall that in David Copperfield there is a character Uncle Dick. Whatever he starts to write about he always ends up writing about the head of King Charles the Martyr.
My King Charles's head is Bethesda. It is another example of a national topography inspired by fundamental Christianity and its child, Christian Zionism. Many towns and villages are named from the Old Testament.
The British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who is partly responsible for the mess the world is in today, was a fervent Zionist.
Journalist Christopher Sykes (son of Mark Sykes, co-author of the disastrous Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916), noted in his “Studies in Virtue” that Lloyd George’s political advisers were unable to train his mind on the map of Palestine during negotiations prior to the Treaty of Versailles. He was schooled by fundamentalist Christian parents in churches named by the geography of ancient Israel. Lloyd George admitted that he was far more familiar with the cities and regions of Biblical Israel than with the geography of his native Wales. His family's firm of solicitors had among their farmer clients the Christian Zionists.
Imperial designs were the primary political motivation in drawing influential British politicians to support the Zionist project. Yet they were predisposed to Zionism.
Balfour’s famous speech of 1919 makes the point: “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.”
MY KINGDOM FOR A STAGE........................................................
I am puzzled that the newly formed National Theatre of Wales should complain it has no theatre building and produces a running repertory in miners' institutes. In North Wales alone in my day there were six civic theatres and I would have thought either the expensive theatre complex in Mold or the other one in Llandudno would have been perfect.
In Llandudno especially the auditorium acoustics are fine. You can see one of the biggest stages in Europe from every seat in the house. The décor, admittedly, is brutalist. Battleship grey with state of the art lighting, it so vividly resembles a warship one is irrestibly drawn on entering to salute the quarter deck. But that is fine too.The only thing wrong with it is the name. It should be called the David Sandbach Theatre.
It is over two decades since I stood in his shop amongst his delicious handmade sweets and shared David's dream of a theatre fit for the Welsh National Opera. He worked incessantly to make that dream come true. He conceived an Arts Festival which enjoyed great success. Writing to tell me about theatre weekends he and his wife had organised, he added a cheerful postcript that he was going into hospital but would see me at the first opera production. He saw the theatre, thank God. But I looked for him in vain at the first opera. I only learned from a review that he had died before that opera returned to the town. He never really recovered from a savage mugging outside his shop, a poor reward for his efforts for Llandudno.
It is even poorer reward that his name was not commemorated in the theatre. Happily, after I had campaigned noisily, a plaque appeared on the foyer wall.
After all, the opera house was really his.
UNREPORTED FACT
In a stark assessment of shootings of locals by US troops at checkpoints in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal said in little-noticed comments last month that during his time as commander there, "We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force."
The comments came during a "virtual town hall" with troops in Afghanistan after one asked McChrystal to comment on the "escalation of force" problem. The general responded that, in the nine months he had been in charge, none of the cases in which "we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it."
In many cases, he added, families were in the vehicles that were fired on.
Every two weeks, McChrystal participates in what he calls "a virtual town hall" meeting in which soldiers in Afghanistan submit questions that he answers over streaming audio.
HE IS SO SENSIBLE YOU WONDER HOW HE GOT THE JOB
“President Obama’s strategy is a sharp shift from those of his predecessors and seeks to revamp the nation’s nuclear posture for a new age in which rogue states and terrorist organizations are greater threats than traditional powers like Russia and China.” …....New York Times
So to me is Bethesda, Gwynedd.
If I were a stranger on my way to Snowdon I doubt if I would get past the Brittania Inn on the far frontier of that magic town, where, long after decimalization, you paid for your beer in pounds, shilling and pence.
It was an inn whose landlord and lady produced one of the truly great child organ playing prodigies of our day. Where shopkeepers met weekly to discuss philosophy, under the chairmanship of a cobbler. The only cobbler I have ever come across, I may say, who had a classical bookshop in the rooms above his last.
A town with one main street and two secondhand bookshops is unusual, even in this land of scholars. Bethesda had two. The Morrises, who ran the other one, are probably the only antiquarian book dealers who also ran a top West End drinking club for gangsters. They were certainly the only council tax payers in Bethesda who retired there from a Mediterranean villa.
What other small town has had a scholar of international repute and an Oxbridge Emeritus professor of Celtic Studies (Idris Foster and Rachel Bromwich) living in the same terrace of houses?
Where else are all the pubs on the same side of the street because the man who owned the other side was a teetotaller?
Bethesda is not beautiful. It is the colour of slate, living proof of the notion that in Wales beauty is received through the ear and not the eye. A sad symphony in stucco, the Welsh teracotta. Yet it is the home of that great painter of mountains David Woodford, the only artist to sell more than a hundred paintings in an exhibition. One of the few men to scale the Snowdon peaks in a Robin Reliant.
Readers of a literary bent will recall that in David Copperfield there is a character Uncle Dick. Whatever he starts to write about he always ends up writing about the head of King Charles the Martyr.
My King Charles's head is Bethesda. It is another example of a national topography inspired by fundamental Christianity and its child, Christian Zionism. Many towns and villages are named from the Old Testament.
The British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who is partly responsible for the mess the world is in today, was a fervent Zionist.
Journalist Christopher Sykes (son of Mark Sykes, co-author of the disastrous Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916), noted in his “Studies in Virtue” that Lloyd George’s political advisers were unable to train his mind on the map of Palestine during negotiations prior to the Treaty of Versailles. He was schooled by fundamentalist Christian parents in churches named by the geography of ancient Israel. Lloyd George admitted that he was far more familiar with the cities and regions of Biblical Israel than with the geography of his native Wales. His family's firm of solicitors had among their farmer clients the Christian Zionists.
Imperial designs were the primary political motivation in drawing influential British politicians to support the Zionist project. Yet they were predisposed to Zionism.
Balfour’s famous speech of 1919 makes the point: “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.”
MY KINGDOM FOR A STAGE........................................................
I am puzzled that the newly formed National Theatre of Wales should complain it has no theatre building and produces a running repertory in miners' institutes. In North Wales alone in my day there were six civic theatres and I would have thought either the expensive theatre complex in Mold or the other one in Llandudno would have been perfect.
In Llandudno especially the auditorium acoustics are fine. You can see one of the biggest stages in Europe from every seat in the house. The décor, admittedly, is brutalist. Battleship grey with state of the art lighting, it so vividly resembles a warship one is irrestibly drawn on entering to salute the quarter deck. But that is fine too.The only thing wrong with it is the name. It should be called the David Sandbach Theatre.
It is over two decades since I stood in his shop amongst his delicious handmade sweets and shared David's dream of a theatre fit for the Welsh National Opera. He worked incessantly to make that dream come true. He conceived an Arts Festival which enjoyed great success. Writing to tell me about theatre weekends he and his wife had organised, he added a cheerful postcript that he was going into hospital but would see me at the first opera production. He saw the theatre, thank God. But I looked for him in vain at the first opera. I only learned from a review that he had died before that opera returned to the town. He never really recovered from a savage mugging outside his shop, a poor reward for his efforts for Llandudno.
It is even poorer reward that his name was not commemorated in the theatre. Happily, after I had campaigned noisily, a plaque appeared on the foyer wall.
After all, the opera house was really his.
UNREPORTED FACT
In a stark assessment of shootings of locals by US troops at checkpoints in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal said in little-noticed comments last month that during his time as commander there, "We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force."
The comments came during a "virtual town hall" with troops in Afghanistan after one asked McChrystal to comment on the "escalation of force" problem. The general responded that, in the nine months he had been in charge, none of the cases in which "we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it."
In many cases, he added, families were in the vehicles that were fired on.
Every two weeks, McChrystal participates in what he calls "a virtual town hall" meeting in which soldiers in Afghanistan submit questions that he answers over streaming audio.
HE IS SO SENSIBLE YOU WONDER HOW HE GOT THE JOB
“President Obama’s strategy is a sharp shift from those of his predecessors and seeks to revamp the nation’s nuclear posture for a new age in which rogue states and terrorist organizations are greater threats than traditional powers like Russia and China.” …....New York Times
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