I have a Noble Friend who sends me cards most weeks but
never at Christmas. His cousin sends me a glorious Christmas Cracker,
an annual 'uncommonplace' book of literary gems he has
collected.
Another friend is even now taking a bearing on my mantelpiece
for the barrage of the Christmas card artillery he will launch
in ample time for recipients to return his festive fire of Yule
logs and complacent robins.
The sadomasochists who ruin my Christmas are the people
who cunningly time their cards to arrive on Christmas Eve when
the last post has already sounded. Their strategy is an empty
mantelpiece. No doubt they gloat over their Christmas dinner of
broiled sardine at the missing cards.
"We didn't get a card from Skidmore," they say, rubbing their
dry parchment hands.
Christmas card etiquette is as complicated as kissing as a
greeting, same person sex and shaking hands. One is never sure
who does what, when and to whom.
I cannot take it any more. I have called for stretcher bearers
and wait to be carried out of the front drop-me-a-line.
Clearly what I need is Christmas Card counselling.
I want to attack robins, to pour water on Yule logs and take
down the decorations on Christmas Eve rather than Twelfth Night.
Not so odd as you may think. By Julius Caesar's sensible
calendar, Twelfth Night is Christmas Day. Alas, our adoption of
Papist tinkering in the 18th century means that only on the
Isle of Foula is the old calendar still in use; and
celebrated, for a reason which escapes me, by shooting sea birds.
Foula is clearly the spiritual home of the RSPB which has
done its best to wipe out the ruddy duck and the
red grouse.
But I digress.
Bring back the pre-American Christmas; a season which
was not dominated by a red-suited drunk.
Have you ever worked out how many glasses of sideboarded sherry
the old reprobate gets through in your street alone?
A red-suited drunk, incidentally, who began life a century ago as
an advertising stunt for a New York store.
Do not get me wrong. True, I founded the SAS - the Scrooge
Appreciation Society - but that stemmed from a deep loathing of
the Family Cratchet.
Christmas was fine until Dickens went to America, saw how
it had been exploited and then returned to set up the Christmas
industry in this poor benighted land.
HOW TO TAKE THE STING OUT OF SUCH CHRISTMAS TALES
When by Monday my Spectator had not arrived I rang their subscription department to complain. The telephone was answered by a girl on whom much attention had been lavished in childhood.
“How perfectly frightful,” she said, in a voice throbbing with sympathy. “Do you know, you must be the nine hundredth person who has rung me this morning. I think we must have fallen foul of the bad weather. You won't believe it, but I sent a Christmas card last Wednesday - to my brother actually - and it still hasn't arrived. Do you think it might be the Christmas mail?”
I said I thought it might be.
“So awful for you,” she said. “I wonder what we can do? I'll tell you what. Can you bear to wait until Wednesday? If it hasn't arrived by then, do ring me back and I will send you another.”
I rang off feeling better than I had felt all day. There are still good things about being English. If it hasn't arrived by Wednesday I will ring her back ,if only to find out if her brother's card has arrived.
Being English took a knock when the Home Secretary ruled out the use of water cannon against the students who urinate on cenotaphs and occupy other people's offices. She said it was “Un-British”.
I would have thought “flammenwerfer” more equable. Though imposing six months' imprisonment on anyone selling fireworks to the under sixteens borders on the excessive. What really brought back one's customary disdain was the behaviour of the Establishment in fitting up the WikiLeaks man.
I got this from the admirable Word a Day:
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Power always has to be kept in check; power exercised in secret, especially under the cloak of national security, is doubly dangerous. -William Proxmire, US senator, reformer (1915-2005)
Saturday, 18 December 2010
Sunday, 12 December 2010
Saturday, 11 December 2010
Turkey Trotted
T
I keep going back in my mind to the Christmas when I was out
of work and this pal of mine said: "Do not suppose you will be
having much of a Christmas?"
I said: "If I wanted a mince pie I would have to buy it on
H.P. We will be out on Xmas Day because it is warmer out than
it is in the house. I have promised the kids we will go to
Radio Rentals to watch the Queen's Speech through the window.
Then we are going to a park to mug robins for their
breadcrumbs."
"Not having a bird on The Day then?"
"Not unless I can grab one of the robins as we steal its
breadcrumbs."
He said: "Why don't you nip down to the market just before it
closes on Xmas Eve? They practically give birds away.
"Then," he said, "come to the Press Party at the Continental
Cinema."
So I did. I picked up a chicken with my last ten bob and
went to the party. Where I set up a record for drinking free
scotch and eating vol-au-vent which was unbroken for many years.
Then this guest said: "Let's play rugby."
Another guest said: "We haven't got a ball."
A third guest said: "Yes, we have" and grabbed the parcel of
chicken from where it had been roosting under my arm.
Everyone but me applauded the skill with which the next
guest, a rather showy chap, executed a back pass with my
parcel between his legs.
I was less pleased than anyone when the next guest followed
through with a drop kick.
It was powerful, I will say that. It sent the parcel soaring
across the foyer, out into the street, over the heads of the
passers-by, to drop, perfectly positioned, under the tyre
of a passing bus.
They were all very apologetic. The manager of the cinema
particularly. He said he hoped the parcel hadn't contained
anything important. I said, no, it was just a chicken I got
for tea on Boxing Night.
For the rest of the party I was a bit thoughtful, though I
did manage to clock up a further freeloader's record of
eighteen scotch and a round dozen vol-au-vents.
At the death the manager came up and gave me a parcel. "I
hope you will accept this replacement with our apologies," he
said.
It was a twelve pound turkey. Which would have been
nice... but we didn't have an oven at the time, just a
gas grill. So we had to cook it a leg at a time.
THE EDITOR WRITES
FOR THE BAH HUMBUG XMAS HAT (given to me by the lady in the chip shop)
Dear
,
Thank you so much for the gift of a magnificent hat which accords with my deeply held resentment of what Xmas has become. I am a Buddhist so it has nothing to do with me and perhaps I ought not to complain. But I do. It is so sad that what in our childhood was such a magical time has become a Festival of Excess. It is, of course, the fault of the Americans who invented Santa Claus in the 1920s as part of an advertising campaign for a department store.
In our day people took it much more seriously. My grannie was fond of telling me how her brother taunted her by telling her there was no such person as Father Xmas. That Xmas morning he woke to find his stocking full of cinders.
I am also anti-Xmas cards which people send far too early, in the hope they will nudge you into sending them one back. I also loathe turkey which may be “bootiful” but has no taste. I would rather have your excellent fish and chips any day.
Many years ago on my BBC programme I invented the S.A.S., The Scrooge Appreciation Society, and was pleasantly surprised at the number of listeners who asked to join.
Alas, this generation is less literate. I wore my humbug hat in March and a small boy thought I was a cough sweet.
Perhaps I may still be permitted to echo the sentiments of that odious Cratchet and wish you a Merry Xmas, enjoyed, of course, with quiet dignity.
SOME THOUGHTS ON EERY EIRE
I CANNOT UNDERSTAND WHY ANYONE ISN’T EUROSCEPTIC, IF ONLY ON THE GROUNDS THAT ANYTHING HEATH ADMIRED WAS BY DEFINITION FLAWED. AND I MUST SAY I WOULD BE PRETTY PISSED OFF, IF I HAD BEEN BLOWN TO PIECES BY THE IRA, AT THE EASE WITH WHICH THEIR HEIRS, FIANNA FAILURE, HAVE GIVEN THEIR COUNTRY TO THE KRAUTS.
GEOFF MATHER WRITES; (read his weekly essay at www.northtrek.co)
A little oldish fellow trudged down the drive, his feet crunching in
the snow and ice. He looked neither to right nor left. He seemed cold
and full of woe. I would have said hello, but he did not look in my
direction. When he walked off, having put something in the letter box, I
took out the single thing there - a card with a picture of some stars.
The message said: Joy to the world, the Lord is come.
TALE PIECE
Gauteng Police announced discovery of:
An arms cache of 200 semi automatic rifles with 250,000 rounds of ammo,
10 anti-tank missiles, 4 grenade launchers, 2 tonnes of heroin,
R80 million forged South African banknotes and 25 trafficked Nigerian
prostitutes, all in a block of flats behind the Hillbrow Public Library.
Local residents were stunned: "We're shocked. We never knew we had a Library!"
I keep going back in my mind to the Christmas when I was out
of work and this pal of mine said: "Do not suppose you will be
having much of a Christmas?"
I said: "If I wanted a mince pie I would have to buy it on
H.P. We will be out on Xmas Day because it is warmer out than
it is in the house. I have promised the kids we will go to
Radio Rentals to watch the Queen's Speech through the window.
Then we are going to a park to mug robins for their
breadcrumbs."
"Not having a bird on The Day then?"
"Not unless I can grab one of the robins as we steal its
breadcrumbs."
He said: "Why don't you nip down to the market just before it
closes on Xmas Eve? They practically give birds away.
"Then," he said, "come to the Press Party at the Continental
Cinema."
So I did. I picked up a chicken with my last ten bob and
went to the party. Where I set up a record for drinking free
scotch and eating vol-au-vent which was unbroken for many years.
Then this guest said: "Let's play rugby."
Another guest said: "We haven't got a ball."
A third guest said: "Yes, we have" and grabbed the parcel of
chicken from where it had been roosting under my arm.
Everyone but me applauded the skill with which the next
guest, a rather showy chap, executed a back pass with my
parcel between his legs.
I was less pleased than anyone when the next guest followed
through with a drop kick.
It was powerful, I will say that. It sent the parcel soaring
across the foyer, out into the street, over the heads of the
passers-by, to drop, perfectly positioned, under the tyre
of a passing bus.
They were all very apologetic. The manager of the cinema
particularly. He said he hoped the parcel hadn't contained
anything important. I said, no, it was just a chicken I got
for tea on Boxing Night.
For the rest of the party I was a bit thoughtful, though I
did manage to clock up a further freeloader's record of
eighteen scotch and a round dozen vol-au-vents.
At the death the manager came up and gave me a parcel. "I
hope you will accept this replacement with our apologies," he
said.
It was a twelve pound turkey. Which would have been
nice... but we didn't have an oven at the time, just a
gas grill. So we had to cook it a leg at a time.
THE EDITOR WRITES
FOR THE BAH HUMBUG XMAS HAT (given to me by the lady in the chip shop)
Dear
,
Thank you so much for the gift of a magnificent hat which accords with my deeply held resentment of what Xmas has become. I am a Buddhist so it has nothing to do with me and perhaps I ought not to complain. But I do. It is so sad that what in our childhood was such a magical time has become a Festival of Excess. It is, of course, the fault of the Americans who invented Santa Claus in the 1920s as part of an advertising campaign for a department store.
In our day people took it much more seriously. My grannie was fond of telling me how her brother taunted her by telling her there was no such person as Father Xmas. That Xmas morning he woke to find his stocking full of cinders.
I am also anti-Xmas cards which people send far too early, in the hope they will nudge you into sending them one back. I also loathe turkey which may be “bootiful” but has no taste. I would rather have your excellent fish and chips any day.
Many years ago on my BBC programme I invented the S.A.S., The Scrooge Appreciation Society, and was pleasantly surprised at the number of listeners who asked to join.
Alas, this generation is less literate. I wore my humbug hat in March and a small boy thought I was a cough sweet.
Perhaps I may still be permitted to echo the sentiments of that odious Cratchet and wish you a Merry Xmas, enjoyed, of course, with quiet dignity.
SOME THOUGHTS ON EERY EIRE
I CANNOT UNDERSTAND WHY ANYONE ISN’T EUROSCEPTIC, IF ONLY ON THE GROUNDS THAT ANYTHING HEATH ADMIRED WAS BY DEFINITION FLAWED. AND I MUST SAY I WOULD BE PRETTY PISSED OFF, IF I HAD BEEN BLOWN TO PIECES BY THE IRA, AT THE EASE WITH WHICH THEIR HEIRS, FIANNA FAILURE, HAVE GIVEN THEIR COUNTRY TO THE KRAUTS.
GEOFF MATHER WRITES; (read his weekly essay at www.northtrek.co)
A little oldish fellow trudged down the drive, his feet crunching in
the snow and ice. He looked neither to right nor left. He seemed cold
and full of woe. I would have said hello, but he did not look in my
direction. When he walked off, having put something in the letter box, I
took out the single thing there - a card with a picture of some stars.
The message said: Joy to the world, the Lord is come.
TALE PIECE
Gauteng Police announced discovery of:
An arms cache of 200 semi automatic rifles with 250,000 rounds of ammo,
10 anti-tank missiles, 4 grenade launchers, 2 tonnes of heroin,
R80 million forged South African banknotes and 25 trafficked Nigerian
prostitutes, all in a block of flats behind the Hillbrow Public Library.
Local residents were stunned: "We're shocked. We never knew we had a Library!"
Friday, 3 December 2010
BALLETOMANIAC
Christmas for me has few essential ingredients and they are mostly DVDs. “A Christmas Carol”, “Pickwick Papers”, “Fledermaus”, “The Merry Widow”. On radio I listen to the Messiah and the carol service from King's College Chapel in Cambridge. The pinnacle of Christmas is reached for me when I watch, as I do every year, Miyako Oshida, the ultimate Sugar Plum Fairy, and her Prince, Jonathan Cope, dance the magical Grand Pas de Deux in the Royal Ballet's production of the “Nutcracker”, choreographed by Pepita.
I would forgo plum pudding, Christmas trees, Melton Mowbray pie, breakfasts with scrambled egg embroidered with smoked salmon and chaperoned by champagne, even the presents, rather than miss those few fleeting moments. They do not dance the roles, they inhabit them. There is nothing in literature, poetry, painting, even music, which moves me more.
It is an odd thing. Most of my friends think of ballet as Pouffs' Football which is very odd. A bevy of under-dressed beauties dance their hearts out accompanied by one male dancer. Yet it is the male they remember.
I have had nasty moments. I shared a birthday with the writer and TV presenter, the deeply missed Shelley Rohde. I would take her and her pride of children to a slap up lunch in the Cheshire countryside and in return she would take me to the ballet, alas on the same day. I fear I usually dropped off early in the performance,sleeping the sleep of repletion. On one dreadful occasion she took me to “Coppelia”. I awoke with a jerk in the scene where all the toys are dancing. Convinced I had got DTs, I leapt up with a scream and fled from the theatre. Nor am I happy that the sprites in “Giselle” are called “Wilis”.
Ballet, the exquisite art of “aristocratic etiquette”, this “science of behaviour toward others”, as a 17th-century ballet master put it, in which lovely young women perch upon their 10 little toe tips (actually, it is really just the two big toes that alternately support the entire body’s weight: think about it) and waft about where the air is thinner - but heaven is closer. As someone wrote recently, “Their pale tulle and satin pointes peek out from the crevices of war, of revolutions, of political machinations, and on the stages of the monarchies and empires of the kings and czars who gave birth to this improbable art.”
A new book “ANGELS: A History of Ballet”. By Jennifer Homans, the definitive history is high on my Christmas list.
“Ballets,” Théophile Gautier wrote, “are the dreams of poets taken seriously.”
The tale of the tutu is the story of a bunch of crazy dreamers, dancers, warriors of anatomy, who formulated shape and perfected the highest form of the human physique.The manifestation of morality in muscle, truly Whitman’s body electric. What a noble and superb cause! What folly in the face of guaranteed evanescence!
The first ballet, “Ballet Comique de la Reine”, which had its premiere in 1581 in the French Court, was an extravagant six-hour affair, performed among the guests in a large gallery at the Petit-Bourbon. The purpose of the ballet was “to raise man up a rung on the Great Chain of Being and bring him closer to the angels and God”. In1636 the Abbé Mersenne referred to “the author of the Universe” as “the great Ballet-master”.
Louis XIII designed costumes, wrote librettos and danced leading roles. Louis XIV made his debut in 1651 at 13 and studied daily for more than 20 years, his dancing master, Beauchamps, who first codified the five positions of the body, providing “the crucial leap from etiquette to art” and they remain to this day the base of classical ballet. The new art spread across Europe from its birth in France, with stopovers in Italy, Denmark, Germany and Austria, landing in Russia in the mid-19th century and then returning to Western Europe in the early years of the 20th century.
The ballerina Marie Sallé in the mid-18th century introduced the novel idea that women, including ones of humble origins, might dance, not just men and kings.
“The history of ballet is also a story of class; ballet is a language of vertical ascent, physicalized nobility. Ballerinas,” Homans writes, “acted like aristocrats even when in real life they most emphatically were not.” But mix they did, and more than one young dancer rose - or descended - to positions other than an arabesque in the famous corridors of the Paris Opera, “the nation’s harem”, as one police official termed it, where wealthy men trolled for pretty girls with limber limbs. “
A family friend, Arnold Haskell, invented the term “Balletomane”. I would rather have done that than invented powered flight. The best I have done is to invent a motto for the animal mad Daily Mirror when I worked there: “Every Day Has Its Dog” - but it nearly got me the sack.
A THING OF A CHIT
Six hundred MP's managed to grab three million pounds of expenses in as many months. One should not be surprised that on Question Time three Mps said the BBC should have kept back the disclosure that the FIPA is bent until we had won the World Cup battle. Unmoved by the fact that if it had it would have been guilty of aiding and abetting fraud for unlawful gain.
We had the same tale of missing millions of pounds in revenue as a result of losing the games. I tried without success to think of a city which held the Games and did not lose a fortune.
BIT BIT OF TAIL PIECE
Disney, no stranger to criticism that it perpetuates troubling gender dynamics, has decided that one of its most iconic characters needs a makeover. After decades as a beloved children's character, Minnie Mouse will get "leggy, modern and glamorous" thanks to a partnership with Forever 21.
Disney did not come right out and say anything was wrong with the "old" Minnie Mouse per se, but the makeover implies plenty. The "new" Minnie is stretched and has become a well-travelled fashionista who knows her way around the fashion capitals of London, Paris and Tokyo.
AND ALL THAT BULL_______
Is it something in the Westminster water? . Bob Russell, the Lib Dem MP for Colchester who is one of the arch critics of the new expenses system, has claimed more than £82 for toilet roll. He says it was a bulk buy. Bristol Labour MP Dawn Primarolo, the former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, has claimed not only for toilet roll but for the holders as well.In an open letter, Ipsa chairman Sir Ian Kennedy said that MPs and been “thoughtful and proper” in making their claims, and when they had been queried it had been due to “misunderstanding” of the new system.
And finally ...
It's not true that only the winners of the X Factor go on to fame and fortune
. Look at JLS, for instance. It's with this in mind that we turn to the first public appearance of one
of the show's two latest rejects, Wagner, who turned up in Dudley in the west midlands signing
autographs in a chip shop.o. THE SUN, P7
Christmas for me has few essential ingredients and they are mostly DVDs. “A Christmas Carol”, “Pickwick Papers”, “Fledermaus”, “The Merry Widow”. On radio I listen to the Messiah and the carol service from King's College Chapel in Cambridge. The pinnacle of Christmas is reached for me when I watch, as I do every year, Miyako Oshida, the ultimate Sugar Plum Fairy, and her Prince, Jonathan Cope, dance the magical Grand Pas de Deux in the Royal Ballet's production of the “Nutcracker”, choreographed by Pepita.
I would forgo plum pudding, Christmas trees, Melton Mowbray pie, breakfasts with scrambled egg embroidered with smoked salmon and chaperoned by champagne, even the presents, rather than miss those few fleeting moments. They do not dance the roles, they inhabit them. There is nothing in literature, poetry, painting, even music, which moves me more.
It is an odd thing. Most of my friends think of ballet as Pouffs' Football which is very odd. A bevy of under-dressed beauties dance their hearts out accompanied by one male dancer. Yet it is the male they remember.
I have had nasty moments. I shared a birthday with the writer and TV presenter, the deeply missed Shelley Rohde. I would take her and her pride of children to a slap up lunch in the Cheshire countryside and in return she would take me to the ballet, alas on the same day. I fear I usually dropped off early in the performance,sleeping the sleep of repletion. On one dreadful occasion she took me to “Coppelia”. I awoke with a jerk in the scene where all the toys are dancing. Convinced I had got DTs, I leapt up with a scream and fled from the theatre. Nor am I happy that the sprites in “Giselle” are called “Wilis”.
Ballet, the exquisite art of “aristocratic etiquette”, this “science of behaviour toward others”, as a 17th-century ballet master put it, in which lovely young women perch upon their 10 little toe tips (actually, it is really just the two big toes that alternately support the entire body’s weight: think about it) and waft about where the air is thinner - but heaven is closer. As someone wrote recently, “Their pale tulle and satin pointes peek out from the crevices of war, of revolutions, of political machinations, and on the stages of the monarchies and empires of the kings and czars who gave birth to this improbable art.”
A new book “ANGELS: A History of Ballet”. By Jennifer Homans, the definitive history is high on my Christmas list.
“Ballets,” Théophile Gautier wrote, “are the dreams of poets taken seriously.”
The tale of the tutu is the story of a bunch of crazy dreamers, dancers, warriors of anatomy, who formulated shape and perfected the highest form of the human physique.The manifestation of morality in muscle, truly Whitman’s body electric. What a noble and superb cause! What folly in the face of guaranteed evanescence!
The first ballet, “Ballet Comique de la Reine”, which had its premiere in 1581 in the French Court, was an extravagant six-hour affair, performed among the guests in a large gallery at the Petit-Bourbon. The purpose of the ballet was “to raise man up a rung on the Great Chain of Being and bring him closer to the angels and God”. In1636 the Abbé Mersenne referred to “the author of the Universe” as “the great Ballet-master”.
Louis XIII designed costumes, wrote librettos and danced leading roles. Louis XIV made his debut in 1651 at 13 and studied daily for more than 20 years, his dancing master, Beauchamps, who first codified the five positions of the body, providing “the crucial leap from etiquette to art” and they remain to this day the base of classical ballet. The new art spread across Europe from its birth in France, with stopovers in Italy, Denmark, Germany and Austria, landing in Russia in the mid-19th century and then returning to Western Europe in the early years of the 20th century.
The ballerina Marie Sallé in the mid-18th century introduced the novel idea that women, including ones of humble origins, might dance, not just men and kings.
“The history of ballet is also a story of class; ballet is a language of vertical ascent, physicalized nobility. Ballerinas,” Homans writes, “acted like aristocrats even when in real life they most emphatically were not.” But mix they did, and more than one young dancer rose - or descended - to positions other than an arabesque in the famous corridors of the Paris Opera, “the nation’s harem”, as one police official termed it, where wealthy men trolled for pretty girls with limber limbs. “
A family friend, Arnold Haskell, invented the term “Balletomane”. I would rather have done that than invented powered flight. The best I have done is to invent a motto for the animal mad Daily Mirror when I worked there: “Every Day Has Its Dog” - but it nearly got me the sack.
A THING OF A CHIT
Six hundred MP's managed to grab three million pounds of expenses in as many months. One should not be surprised that on Question Time three Mps said the BBC should have kept back the disclosure that the FIPA is bent until we had won the World Cup battle, unmoved by the fact that if it had it would have been quilty of aiding and abetting fraud for unlawful gain.
We had the same tale of missing millions of pounds in revenue as a result. I teied without success to think of a city which held the Games and did not lose a fortune.
BIT BIT OF TAIL PIECE
Disney, no stranger to criticism that it perpetuates troubling gender dynamics, has decided that one of its most iconic characters needs a makeover. After decades as a beloved children's character, Minnie Mouse will get "leggy, modern and glamorous" thanks to a partnership with Forever 21.
Disney did not come right out and say anything was wrong with the "old" Minnie Mouse per se, but the makeover implies plenty. The "new" Minnie is stretched and has become a well-travelled fashionista who knows her way around the fashion capitals of London, Paris and Tokyo.
AND ALL THAT BULL_______
Is it something in the Westminster water? . Bob Russell, the Lib Dem MP for Colchester who is one of the arch critics of the new expenses system, has claimed more than £82 for toilet roll. He says it was a bulk buy. Bristol Labour MP Dawn Primarolo, the former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, has claimed not only for toilet roll but for the holders as well.In an open letter, Ipsa chairman Sir Ian Kennedy said that MPs and been “thoughtful and proper” in making their claims, and when they had been queried it had been due to “misunderstanding” of the new system.
And finally ...
It's not true that only the winners of the X Factor go on to fame and fortune
. Look at JLS, for instance. It's with this in mind that we turn to the first public appearance of one
of the show's two latest rejects, Wagner, who turned up in Dudley in the west midlands signing
autographs in a chip shop.o. THE SUN, P7
I would forgo plum pudding, Christmas trees, Melton Mowbray pie, breakfasts with scrambled egg embroidered with smoked salmon and chaperoned by champagne, even the presents, rather than miss those few fleeting moments. They do not dance the roles, they inhabit them. There is nothing in literature, poetry, painting, even music, which moves me more.
It is an odd thing. Most of my friends think of ballet as Pouffs' Football which is very odd. A bevy of under-dressed beauties dance their hearts out accompanied by one male dancer. Yet it is the male they remember.
I have had nasty moments. I shared a birthday with the writer and TV presenter, the deeply missed Shelley Rohde. I would take her and her pride of children to a slap up lunch in the Cheshire countryside and in return she would take me to the ballet, alas on the same day. I fear I usually dropped off early in the performance,sleeping the sleep of repletion. On one dreadful occasion she took me to “Coppelia”. I awoke with a jerk in the scene where all the toys are dancing. Convinced I had got DTs, I leapt up with a scream and fled from the theatre. Nor am I happy that the sprites in “Giselle” are called “Wilis”.
Ballet, the exquisite art of “aristocratic etiquette”, this “science of behaviour toward others”, as a 17th-century ballet master put it, in which lovely young women perch upon their 10 little toe tips (actually, it is really just the two big toes that alternately support the entire body’s weight: think about it) and waft about where the air is thinner - but heaven is closer. As someone wrote recently, “Their pale tulle and satin pointes peek out from the crevices of war, of revolutions, of political machinations, and on the stages of the monarchies and empires of the kings and czars who gave birth to this improbable art.”
A new book “ANGELS: A History of Ballet”. By Jennifer Homans, the definitive history is high on my Christmas list.
“Ballets,” Théophile Gautier wrote, “are the dreams of poets taken seriously.”
The tale of the tutu is the story of a bunch of crazy dreamers, dancers, warriors of anatomy, who formulated shape and perfected the highest form of the human physique.The manifestation of morality in muscle, truly Whitman’s body electric. What a noble and superb cause! What folly in the face of guaranteed evanescence!
The first ballet, “Ballet Comique de la Reine”, which had its premiere in 1581 in the French Court, was an extravagant six-hour affair, performed among the guests in a large gallery at the Petit-Bourbon. The purpose of the ballet was “to raise man up a rung on the Great Chain of Being and bring him closer to the angels and God”. In1636 the Abbé Mersenne referred to “the author of the Universe” as “the great Ballet-master”.
Louis XIII designed costumes, wrote librettos and danced leading roles. Louis XIV made his debut in 1651 at 13 and studied daily for more than 20 years, his dancing master, Beauchamps, who first codified the five positions of the body, providing “the crucial leap from etiquette to art” and they remain to this day the base of classical ballet. The new art spread across Europe from its birth in France, with stopovers in Italy, Denmark, Germany and Austria, landing in Russia in the mid-19th century and then returning to Western Europe in the early years of the 20th century.
The ballerina Marie Sallé in the mid-18th century introduced the novel idea that women, including ones of humble origins, might dance, not just men and kings.
“The history of ballet is also a story of class; ballet is a language of vertical ascent, physicalized nobility. Ballerinas,” Homans writes, “acted like aristocrats even when in real life they most emphatically were not.” But mix they did, and more than one young dancer rose - or descended - to positions other than an arabesque in the famous corridors of the Paris Opera, “the nation’s harem”, as one police official termed it, where wealthy men trolled for pretty girls with limber limbs. “
A family friend, Arnold Haskell, invented the term “Balletomane”. I would rather have done that than invented powered flight. The best I have done is to invent a motto for the animal mad Daily Mirror when I worked there: “Every Day Has Its Dog” - but it nearly got me the sack.
A THING OF A CHIT
Six hundred MP's managed to grab three million pounds of expenses in as many months. One should not be surprised that on Question Time three Mps said the BBC should have kept back the disclosure that the FIPA is bent until we had won the World Cup battle. Unmoved by the fact that if it had it would have been guilty of aiding and abetting fraud for unlawful gain.
We had the same tale of missing millions of pounds in revenue as a result of losing the games. I tried without success to think of a city which held the Games and did not lose a fortune.
BIT BIT OF TAIL PIECE
Disney, no stranger to criticism that it perpetuates troubling gender dynamics, has decided that one of its most iconic characters needs a makeover. After decades as a beloved children's character, Minnie Mouse will get "leggy, modern and glamorous" thanks to a partnership with Forever 21.
Disney did not come right out and say anything was wrong with the "old" Minnie Mouse per se, but the makeover implies plenty. The "new" Minnie is stretched and has become a well-travelled fashionista who knows her way around the fashion capitals of London, Paris and Tokyo.
AND ALL THAT BULL_______
Is it something in the Westminster water? . Bob Russell, the Lib Dem MP for Colchester who is one of the arch critics of the new expenses system, has claimed more than £82 for toilet roll. He says it was a bulk buy. Bristol Labour MP Dawn Primarolo, the former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, has claimed not only for toilet roll but for the holders as well.In an open letter, Ipsa chairman Sir Ian Kennedy said that MPs and been “thoughtful and proper” in making their claims, and when they had been queried it had been due to “misunderstanding” of the new system.
And finally ...
It's not true that only the winners of the X Factor go on to fame and fortune
. Look at JLS, for instance. It's with this in mind that we turn to the first public appearance of one
of the show's two latest rejects, Wagner, who turned up in Dudley in the west midlands signing
autographs in a chip shop.o. THE SUN, P7
Christmas for me has few essential ingredients and they are mostly DVDs. “A Christmas Carol”, “Pickwick Papers”, “Fledermaus”, “The Merry Widow”. On radio I listen to the Messiah and the carol service from King's College Chapel in Cambridge. The pinnacle of Christmas is reached for me when I watch, as I do every year, Miyako Oshida, the ultimate Sugar Plum Fairy, and her Prince, Jonathan Cope, dance the magical Grand Pas de Deux in the Royal Ballet's production of the “Nutcracker”, choreographed by Pepita.
I would forgo plum pudding, Christmas trees, Melton Mowbray pie, breakfasts with scrambled egg embroidered with smoked salmon and chaperoned by champagne, even the presents, rather than miss those few fleeting moments. They do not dance the roles, they inhabit them. There is nothing in literature, poetry, painting, even music, which moves me more.
It is an odd thing. Most of my friends think of ballet as Pouffs' Football which is very odd. A bevy of under-dressed beauties dance their hearts out accompanied by one male dancer. Yet it is the male they remember.
I have had nasty moments. I shared a birthday with the writer and TV presenter, the deeply missed Shelley Rohde. I would take her and her pride of children to a slap up lunch in the Cheshire countryside and in return she would take me to the ballet, alas on the same day. I fear I usually dropped off early in the performance,sleeping the sleep of repletion. On one dreadful occasion she took me to “Coppelia”. I awoke with a jerk in the scene where all the toys are dancing. Convinced I had got DTs, I leapt up with a scream and fled from the theatre. Nor am I happy that the sprites in “Giselle” are called “Wilis”.
Ballet, the exquisite art of “aristocratic etiquette”, this “science of behaviour toward others”, as a 17th-century ballet master put it, in which lovely young women perch upon their 10 little toe tips (actually, it is really just the two big toes that alternately support the entire body’s weight: think about it) and waft about where the air is thinner - but heaven is closer. As someone wrote recently, “Their pale tulle and satin pointes peek out from the crevices of war, of revolutions, of political machinations, and on the stages of the monarchies and empires of the kings and czars who gave birth to this improbable art.”
A new book “ANGELS: A History of Ballet”. By Jennifer Homans, the definitive history is high on my Christmas list.
“Ballets,” Théophile Gautier wrote, “are the dreams of poets taken seriously.”
The tale of the tutu is the story of a bunch of crazy dreamers, dancers, warriors of anatomy, who formulated shape and perfected the highest form of the human physique.The manifestation of morality in muscle, truly Whitman’s body electric. What a noble and superb cause! What folly in the face of guaranteed evanescence!
The first ballet, “Ballet Comique de la Reine”, which had its premiere in 1581 in the French Court, was an extravagant six-hour affair, performed among the guests in a large gallery at the Petit-Bourbon. The purpose of the ballet was “to raise man up a rung on the Great Chain of Being and bring him closer to the angels and God”. In1636 the Abbé Mersenne referred to “the author of the Universe” as “the great Ballet-master”.
Louis XIII designed costumes, wrote librettos and danced leading roles. Louis XIV made his debut in 1651 at 13 and studied daily for more than 20 years, his dancing master, Beauchamps, who first codified the five positions of the body, providing “the crucial leap from etiquette to art” and they remain to this day the base of classical ballet. The new art spread across Europe from its birth in France, with stopovers in Italy, Denmark, Germany and Austria, landing in Russia in the mid-19th century and then returning to Western Europe in the early years of the 20th century.
The ballerina Marie Sallé in the mid-18th century introduced the novel idea that women, including ones of humble origins, might dance, not just men and kings.
“The history of ballet is also a story of class; ballet is a language of vertical ascent, physicalized nobility. Ballerinas,” Homans writes, “acted like aristocrats even when in real life they most emphatically were not.” But mix they did, and more than one young dancer rose - or descended - to positions other than an arabesque in the famous corridors of the Paris Opera, “the nation’s harem”, as one police official termed it, where wealthy men trolled for pretty girls with limber limbs. “
A family friend, Arnold Haskell, invented the term “Balletomane”. I would rather have done that than invented powered flight. The best I have done is to invent a motto for the animal mad Daily Mirror when I worked there: “Every Day Has Its Dog” - but it nearly got me the sack.
A THING OF A CHIT
Six hundred MP's managed to grab three million pounds of expenses in as many months. One should not be surprised that on Question Time three Mps said the BBC should have kept back the disclosure that the FIPA is bent until we had won the World Cup battle, unmoved by the fact that if it had it would have been quilty of aiding and abetting fraud for unlawful gain.
We had the same tale of missing millions of pounds in revenue as a result. I teied without success to think of a city which held the Games and did not lose a fortune.
BIT BIT OF TAIL PIECE
Disney, no stranger to criticism that it perpetuates troubling gender dynamics, has decided that one of its most iconic characters needs a makeover. After decades as a beloved children's character, Minnie Mouse will get "leggy, modern and glamorous" thanks to a partnership with Forever 21.
Disney did not come right out and say anything was wrong with the "old" Minnie Mouse per se, but the makeover implies plenty. The "new" Minnie is stretched and has become a well-travelled fashionista who knows her way around the fashion capitals of London, Paris and Tokyo.
AND ALL THAT BULL_______
Is it something in the Westminster water? . Bob Russell, the Lib Dem MP for Colchester who is one of the arch critics of the new expenses system, has claimed more than £82 for toilet roll. He says it was a bulk buy. Bristol Labour MP Dawn Primarolo, the former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, has claimed not only for toilet roll but for the holders as well.In an open letter, Ipsa chairman Sir Ian Kennedy said that MPs and been “thoughtful and proper” in making their claims, and when they had been queried it had been due to “misunderstanding” of the new system.
And finally ...
It's not true that only the winners of the X Factor go on to fame and fortune
. Look at JLS, for instance. It's with this in mind that we turn to the first public appearance of one
of the show's two latest rejects, Wagner, who turned up in Dudley in the west midlands signing
autographs in a chip shop.o. THE SUN, P7
Friday, 26 November 2010
PANT O' MINE
Over the centuries the great names in pantomime have included John Rich, David Garrick, Joe Grimaldi, Dan Leno, William Beverley, E.L. Blanchard, Herbert Campbell, Nat Jackley, Florrie Ford, Dorothy Ward, Wyn Calvin, King Charles II, the Emperor Augustus and my Mum who was Second Principal Boy in “Aladdin” at the Theatre Royal, Salford, in 1917.
Augustus played a pantomime - the word is Greek for dumb show performer - in his court entertainments. When the Christians came to power such shows were banned. An act of cultural savagery only paralleled by the Puritans who banned Christmas - and New Labour which made T Bone steaks illegal and tried to do the same with turkey.
Happily pantomime, the most magical theatrical event, survived down the centuries with groups of players putting on “Commedia dell’ Arte”, simple stories about an old man Pantaloon who tries to guard his pretty daughter Columbine from the dashing Harlequin. Harlequin bribes Pantaloon’s servant Polcinella to perform tricks to prevent his master catching them.
That Merrie Monarch Charles II brought “Commedia” to London where it split into separate theatrical traditions: Polcinella fathered Punch and Judy and Harlequin pantomime.
The first musical play was put on by John Weaver, a Shrewsbury dancing master, at Drury Lane in 1702. His boss, actor John Rich called it pantomime and introduced magical tricks. He was a brilliant mime artist but could not speak properly and his company were such lousy actors the performances were done in dumb show. Rich invented Harlequin’s costume of many colours for a very good practical reason. Each colour, the audience was told, represented an emotion. Yellow for jealousy, blue for truth, scarlet for love. When Harlequin wanted to express an emotion he would strike an attitude and point to a colour. He could even make himself invisible by pointing at black. Even Rich's scenery was inventive. He represented rough seas by getting small boys to jump up and down under a canvas sheet.
Rich’s pantomimes were so successful that tragedian David Garrick was forced against his will to put one on. Garrick was a great actor but a poor mime. His Harlequin had a speaking role.
Rich invented many of the pantomime traditions, beautiful scenery and mechanical monsters among them. When by 1789 people tired of the Harlequin tales he adapted Robinson Crusoe, the first of the traditional pantomimes. When a critic suggested it might be a good idea to adapt other tales like Cinderella, Babes in the Wood and Puss in Boots as pantomime, everyone thought he was crazy.
William Beverley invented the transformation scene, while he and E.T. Smith, the lessee of Drury Lane, watched a leg of mutton roasting on a spit. Said Smith: “Wouldn’t it be a good idea to have a stage that revolved like that mutton, changing colour as it is doing under the flame?”
“I will paint you one,” said Beverley. In 1859 a wondering audience gasped at its first transformation scene.
I am delighted it was a journalist E.L. Blanchard who invented the modern panto and brought in the first man to play dame. She was called Widow Twankey after the china tea Twankay which was popular at the time. And it was Blanchard who decided the Principal Boy should be a girl. The first, a Miss Ellington, appeared in his first pantomime in 1852. He wrote every Drury Lane pantomime and many more from then until 1888.
Oh yes he did.............................................
A TIMELY REMINDER
Sam Johnson wisely said that no-one but a blockhead writes except for money. Nevertheless, when The Times used an interview with cousin Isabel,- now 7th in Amazon's Pre Order charts and winner of the Yorkshire Young Acheiver in the Arts - to complain at the exploitation of children by record companies it was necessary to send out letters of fire and sword:
Sir,
I am at a loss to see any evidence of the exploitation of children in your story “Isabel the Choirgirl” on the Arts page (24/11). Following the writer's argument is like pursuing a ferret down a dark hole. She seems to suggest that boy trebles were exploited because a record company dropped them when their voices broke. The alternative was to cut a record of a group of boys who could not sing. Tempting as it is to suggest that a similar disadvantage has not harmed the success of our pop stars, it is not quite the same when there are pretensions of harmony. I cannot think such a record would sell many copies.
Speaking as a grandfather, I can assure you that in the present day exploitation of the British young is an oxymoron. Those boys for whom your writer seeks sympathy were the envy of every other teenager in Britain. They had their Warhol moment and will carry the memory with them into old age. It was their own fault that they did not turn that moment into a career like Ernest Lush, or more recently Aled Jones.
When Aled Jones was 16 his voice broke. At the suggestion of his father, I included him in my radio series “Radio Brynsiencyn” on BBC Wales. In very short order he became a proficient interviewer and presenter and went on to music college where he formed a band and experimented with other kinds of singing. After music college he joined a theatre company in Bristol where he learned to act. Those skills assembled, he went on to forge a new and highly successful career on stage, screen and radio. .As Hotspur suggested, nettles are for grasping.
In passing I was sad to see that your reporter should, like Adrian Chiles on Daybreak, make a bitter jibe about Isabel's surname “Suckling”. Half a century ago when I wrote for The Times I would have been expected to know that Suckling is the family name of her ancestor, Lord Nelson's wife.
May I illustrate this with an example of that happier time? Putting over my copy about an exhibition of Icons at the Chester Festival, the copy-taker insisted I had given one of them an over valuation. “Expert, are you?” I sneered. “Perhaps not expert,” he said, “but I have written a book on the subject which has been well received.”
Next time may I suggest you send a copy-taker.
Yours faithfully,
Ian Skidmore
12-year-old Cousin Isabel put the feature writer in her place in fewer words when, gathering her text books, she told her:
“I don't know if this sounds bad, but I'm not expecting anything out of this. Some people expect that because I have a record contract it's going to escalate to something, but it might not. I just take it as it comes along.“
How Isabel's voice matures is unpredictable but she will certainly outgrow the
Choirgirl image. “When I'm 18 I wouldn't like to be photographed at 1am falling out of a bar in the cassock,” she told the interviewer with good humour.
Out of the mouths of Babes and Sucklings................................
S>A>S
Joyce, the lady in the chip shop, has given me a woolly hat emblazoned with “BAH HUMBUG”, the motto of the Scrooge Appreciation Society of which I have the honour to be the founder. Reactions of the outside world have not done much for the reputation of our standards of national literacy. Said a small boy: “Are you a toffee?”
Augustus played a pantomime - the word is Greek for dumb show performer - in his court entertainments. When the Christians came to power such shows were banned. An act of cultural savagery only paralleled by the Puritans who banned Christmas - and New Labour which made T Bone steaks illegal and tried to do the same with turkey.
Happily pantomime, the most magical theatrical event, survived down the centuries with groups of players putting on “Commedia dell’ Arte”, simple stories about an old man Pantaloon who tries to guard his pretty daughter Columbine from the dashing Harlequin. Harlequin bribes Pantaloon’s servant Polcinella to perform tricks to prevent his master catching them.
That Merrie Monarch Charles II brought “Commedia” to London where it split into separate theatrical traditions: Polcinella fathered Punch and Judy and Harlequin pantomime.
The first musical play was put on by John Weaver, a Shrewsbury dancing master, at Drury Lane in 1702. His boss, actor John Rich called it pantomime and introduced magical tricks. He was a brilliant mime artist but could not speak properly and his company were such lousy actors the performances were done in dumb show. Rich invented Harlequin’s costume of many colours for a very good practical reason. Each colour, the audience was told, represented an emotion. Yellow for jealousy, blue for truth, scarlet for love. When Harlequin wanted to express an emotion he would strike an attitude and point to a colour. He could even make himself invisible by pointing at black. Even Rich's scenery was inventive. He represented rough seas by getting small boys to jump up and down under a canvas sheet.
Rich’s pantomimes were so successful that tragedian David Garrick was forced against his will to put one on. Garrick was a great actor but a poor mime. His Harlequin had a speaking role.
Rich invented many of the pantomime traditions, beautiful scenery and mechanical monsters among them. When by 1789 people tired of the Harlequin tales he adapted Robinson Crusoe, the first of the traditional pantomimes. When a critic suggested it might be a good idea to adapt other tales like Cinderella, Babes in the Wood and Puss in Boots as pantomime, everyone thought he was crazy.
William Beverley invented the transformation scene, while he and E.T. Smith, the lessee of Drury Lane, watched a leg of mutton roasting on a spit. Said Smith: “Wouldn’t it be a good idea to have a stage that revolved like that mutton, changing colour as it is doing under the flame?”
“I will paint you one,” said Beverley. In 1859 a wondering audience gasped at its first transformation scene.
I am delighted it was a journalist E.L. Blanchard who invented the modern panto and brought in the first man to play dame. She was called Widow Twankey after the china tea Twankay which was popular at the time. And it was Blanchard who decided the Principal Boy should be a girl. The first, a Miss Ellington, appeared in his first pantomime in 1852. He wrote every Drury Lane pantomime and many more from then until 1888.
Oh yes he did.............................................
A TIMELY REMINDER
Sam Johnson wisely said that no-one but a blockhead writes except for money. Nevertheless, when The Times used an interview with cousin Isabel,- now 7th in Amazon's Pre Order charts and winner of the Yorkshire Young Acheiver in the Arts - to complain at the exploitation of children by record companies it was necessary to send out letters of fire and sword:
Sir,
I am at a loss to see any evidence of the exploitation of children in your story “Isabel the Choirgirl” on the Arts page (24/11). Following the writer's argument is like pursuing a ferret down a dark hole. She seems to suggest that boy trebles were exploited because a record company dropped them when their voices broke. The alternative was to cut a record of a group of boys who could not sing. Tempting as it is to suggest that a similar disadvantage has not harmed the success of our pop stars, it is not quite the same when there are pretensions of harmony. I cannot think such a record would sell many copies.
Speaking as a grandfather, I can assure you that in the present day exploitation of the British young is an oxymoron. Those boys for whom your writer seeks sympathy were the envy of every other teenager in Britain. They had their Warhol moment and will carry the memory with them into old age. It was their own fault that they did not turn that moment into a career like Ernest Lush, or more recently Aled Jones.
When Aled Jones was 16 his voice broke. At the suggestion of his father, I included him in my radio series “Radio Brynsiencyn” on BBC Wales. In very short order he became a proficient interviewer and presenter and went on to music college where he formed a band and experimented with other kinds of singing. After music college he joined a theatre company in Bristol where he learned to act. Those skills assembled, he went on to forge a new and highly successful career on stage, screen and radio. .As Hotspur suggested, nettles are for grasping.
In passing I was sad to see that your reporter should, like Adrian Chiles on Daybreak, make a bitter jibe about Isabel's surname “Suckling”. Half a century ago when I wrote for The Times I would have been expected to know that Suckling is the family name of her ancestor, Lord Nelson's wife.
May I illustrate this with an example of that happier time? Putting over my copy about an exhibition of Icons at the Chester Festival, the copy-taker insisted I had given one of them an over valuation. “Expert, are you?” I sneered. “Perhaps not expert,” he said, “but I have written a book on the subject which has been well received.”
Next time may I suggest you send a copy-taker.
Yours faithfully,
Ian Skidmore
12-year-old Cousin Isabel put the feature writer in her place in fewer words when, gathering her text books, she told her:
“I don't know if this sounds bad, but I'm not expecting anything out of this. Some people expect that because I have a record contract it's going to escalate to something, but it might not. I just take it as it comes along.“
How Isabel's voice matures is unpredictable but she will certainly outgrow the
Choirgirl image. “When I'm 18 I wouldn't like to be photographed at 1am falling out of a bar in the cassock,” she told the interviewer with good humour.
Out of the mouths of Babes and Sucklings................................
S>A>S
Joyce, the lady in the chip shop, has given me a woolly hat emblazoned with “BAH HUMBUG”, the motto of the Scrooge Appreciation Society of which I have the honour to be the founder. Reactions of the outside world have not done much for the reputation of our standards of national literacy. Said a small boy: “Are you a toffee?”
Friday, 19 November 2010
LOUSES of PARLIAMENT
See the politicians forming a disorderly queue for the dock in the Old Bailey. Luckier ones escaped a similar fate by paying back the millions they acquired by a parliament-backed fraud. An MP admits he used a house the taxpayer funded as security on a loan. Disgraced MPs are caught on camera offering to subvert their former colleagues in the interests of business. MPs rush to defend one of their fellows who has been kicked out for cruel defamation of a competitor.
Gerry Adams, former IRA terrorist leader, was elected an MP but refused on principle to attend parliament although he took salary and expenses. Now he has decided to resign and will walk away from Westminster with a £41,000 pay off.
Unaccountably the House of Lords seeks to prevent a cut in the number of MPs though we have the most of any EC country. Those that remain share with those who may go another distinction. They have allowed themselves to become lobby fodder to Europe and their own sofa cabinet.
The Government shamelessly admits giving to “terrorists“ from Guantanamo Bay a multi-million pound bribe to drop their claims of British collusion in their torture.
Scoop a netful of the pond life which swims in the waters of Westminster. Ask them why they came into Parliament. With one voice they will utter the mantra, “We wanted to make a difference.”
It would be salutary to examine the DIFFERENCES that politicians have made since Western Civilisation ended in 1914.
We are at war with the Muslim World because of our Janus- faced government. They won the Arab tribes to the Allied side in World War One with promises that after the Ottoman Empire was smashed the Arabs would be given their land back. They were not told that in 1917 under the terms of the Sykes-Picot treaty their land would be shared between England and France.
The reason the Palestinians and Israelis are fighting is another consequence of duplicity. The Balfour Doctrine awarded the Jews a homeland that the Palestinians had lived on for centuries. Again they did not tell the Arabs. Its architects, Lloyd George and Balfour, were both Christian Zionists. Lloyd George had another reason for keeping the Israelis sweet. His family firm of solicitors represented the Zionist movement.
The reason the Nazi party came into being and the world war that followed were a direct consequence of the crippling reparations the Germans had to pay after world war one.
Our subsequent invasions of other sovereign countries are too many to mention.
The most recent catastrophic failure of Government was to take us to the verge of bankruptcy by its failure to regulate bankers, whose patron saint is Francis. He, you recall, gave away his father's goods just as they made free with our money and then borrowed money from us. Even when it had walked us down the crooked mile the Government had not finished with us. It imposed drastic cuts on us and immediately spent the £7 billion we would have saved this year by giving it to the Irish Government to save them from the disaster which was the inevitable cost of government by Hire Purchase.
It is a small consolation that compared with the venal Irish government our own merry band of outlaws shines like a good deed. Perhaps the Government should study the history of the ruling party Fianna Fail. It is the child of the IRA, which in 1922 rejected a treaty with Britain and went to war with the Irish Free State, the new government of Eire. Ten years later it wrested power and launched an economic war on the British Empire. After twice almost ruining the economy, in 1970 Fail launched the Provisional IRA with government funds.
With friends like that...............................
REMEMBER THEM
Every Armistice Day for many years I stood in the main road in our village and recited, for the benefit of the British Legion and other veterans, those immortal words: “They shall not grow old as we who are left grow old. Age shall not weary them nor the years condemn.”
Words so beautiful we never examine the thought behind them. Frankly it is an insult to those millions of servicemen whose shades presumably watch over us. Are they supposed to be grateful that they were blown to pieces on the threshold of manhood? Are they relieved that years cannot condemn them to a lifetime of laughter, love, marriage, literature and all the other things which are the gifts of life?
Don't take a vote on it. “Grateful Dead” is an oxymoron. “Growing old?” I will lay odds they wouldn't mind a slice of that. Their frail spirits would no doubt add: “Kindly put my name down for being by the years condemned.”
It would be more to the point to recite Dylan Thomas's “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.”
There is something demeaning in the howls of protest which greeted the news reader who insisted he would only wear the poppy on Remembrance Day, which not all that long ago everyone did. Just so long as you buy one, when you wear it is unimportant.
I have become sickened by the whole Festival of Remembrance, which every year reeks of show business. This year new depths were plunged by parading the war widows after a heart breaking video interview with one. Isabel the Choirgirl
sang as they marched across the arena. After the rehearsal when she first saw them, immediately after watching the video, she burst into tears. The only way she could get through the performance was by not looking at that sad procession. If I were a dead soldier I would value that child's tears more than a thousand poppies floating down from the roof of the Albert Hall.
Incidentally, I hope someone paid for that mawkish gesture more suited to a scene in a Disney Madame Butterfly.
I found myself wondering what the widows were thinking. Perhaps that the government had rewarded them for their tragic loss by reducing their pensions. Look on the bright side. The money the government grabs from the widows and their mites will help to pay the bribes of the tortured Muslims.
ROYAL FOOTMAN NOTE
Three women have saved the monarchy and all with firmly working class roots: the Queen Mother, Camilla and Miss Middleton.
HUZZAH,THREE TIMES THREE
SO YOU THINK IT IS FUN BEING OLD
My friend Geoff Mather emails:
“I am passing on some vital information that might have escaped your attention as it did mine:
The information comes from Lancashire District Aged Aid Assimilation
project, dedicated to correcting the unfortunate discrepancies in the
lives of senior people like us.
Today is Thursday.
Please let me know if you wish to have daily bulletins from LDAAA.
Subject: What day is it? A primer
You will, for instance, be told immediately when it is Friday.
Monday alone will not be notified week by week in conformity with Mr
Cameron's need to conserve both energy and money.
Gerry Adams, former IRA terrorist leader, was elected an MP but refused on principle to attend parliament although he took salary and expenses. Now he has decided to resign and will walk away from Westminster with a £41,000 pay off.
Unaccountably the House of Lords seeks to prevent a cut in the number of MPs though we have the most of any EC country. Those that remain share with those who may go another distinction. They have allowed themselves to become lobby fodder to Europe and their own sofa cabinet.
The Government shamelessly admits giving to “terrorists“ from Guantanamo Bay a multi-million pound bribe to drop their claims of British collusion in their torture.
Scoop a netful of the pond life which swims in the waters of Westminster. Ask them why they came into Parliament. With one voice they will utter the mantra, “We wanted to make a difference.”
It would be salutary to examine the DIFFERENCES that politicians have made since Western Civilisation ended in 1914.
We are at war with the Muslim World because of our Janus- faced government. They won the Arab tribes to the Allied side in World War One with promises that after the Ottoman Empire was smashed the Arabs would be given their land back. They were not told that in 1917 under the terms of the Sykes-Picot treaty their land would be shared between England and France.
The reason the Palestinians and Israelis are fighting is another consequence of duplicity. The Balfour Doctrine awarded the Jews a homeland that the Palestinians had lived on for centuries. Again they did not tell the Arabs. Its architects, Lloyd George and Balfour, were both Christian Zionists. Lloyd George had another reason for keeping the Israelis sweet. His family firm of solicitors represented the Zionist movement.
The reason the Nazi party came into being and the world war that followed were a direct consequence of the crippling reparations the Germans had to pay after world war one.
Our subsequent invasions of other sovereign countries are too many to mention.
The most recent catastrophic failure of Government was to take us to the verge of bankruptcy by its failure to regulate bankers, whose patron saint is Francis. He, you recall, gave away his father's goods just as they made free with our money and then borrowed money from us. Even when it had walked us down the crooked mile the Government had not finished with us. It imposed drastic cuts on us and immediately spent the £7 billion we would have saved this year by giving it to the Irish Government to save them from the disaster which was the inevitable cost of government by Hire Purchase.
It is a small consolation that compared with the venal Irish government our own merry band of outlaws shines like a good deed. Perhaps the Government should study the history of the ruling party Fianna Fail. It is the child of the IRA, which in 1922 rejected a treaty with Britain and went to war with the Irish Free State, the new government of Eire. Ten years later it wrested power and launched an economic war on the British Empire. After twice almost ruining the economy, in 1970 Fail launched the Provisional IRA with government funds.
With friends like that...............................
REMEMBER THEM
Every Armistice Day for many years I stood in the main road in our village and recited, for the benefit of the British Legion and other veterans, those immortal words: “They shall not grow old as we who are left grow old. Age shall not weary them nor the years condemn.”
Words so beautiful we never examine the thought behind them. Frankly it is an insult to those millions of servicemen whose shades presumably watch over us. Are they supposed to be grateful that they were blown to pieces on the threshold of manhood? Are they relieved that years cannot condemn them to a lifetime of laughter, love, marriage, literature and all the other things which are the gifts of life?
Don't take a vote on it. “Grateful Dead” is an oxymoron. “Growing old?” I will lay odds they wouldn't mind a slice of that. Their frail spirits would no doubt add: “Kindly put my name down for being by the years condemned.”
It would be more to the point to recite Dylan Thomas's “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.”
There is something demeaning in the howls of protest which greeted the news reader who insisted he would only wear the poppy on Remembrance Day, which not all that long ago everyone did. Just so long as you buy one, when you wear it is unimportant.
I have become sickened by the whole Festival of Remembrance, which every year reeks of show business. This year new depths were plunged by parading the war widows after a heart breaking video interview with one. Isabel the Choirgirl
sang as they marched across the arena. After the rehearsal when she first saw them, immediately after watching the video, she burst into tears. The only way she could get through the performance was by not looking at that sad procession. If I were a dead soldier I would value that child's tears more than a thousand poppies floating down from the roof of the Albert Hall.
Incidentally, I hope someone paid for that mawkish gesture more suited to a scene in a Disney Madame Butterfly.
I found myself wondering what the widows were thinking. Perhaps that the government had rewarded them for their tragic loss by reducing their pensions. Look on the bright side. The money the government grabs from the widows and their mites will help to pay the bribes of the tortured Muslims.
ROYAL FOOTMAN NOTE
Three women have saved the monarchy and all with firmly working class roots: the Queen Mother, Camilla and Miss Middleton.
HUZZAH,THREE TIMES THREE
SO YOU THINK IT IS FUN BEING OLD
My friend Geoff Mather emails:
“I am passing on some vital information that might have escaped your attention as it did mine:
The information comes from Lancashire District Aged Aid Assimilation
project, dedicated to correcting the unfortunate discrepancies in the
lives of senior people like us.
Today is Thursday.
Please let me know if you wish to have daily bulletins from LDAAA.
Subject: What day is it? A primer
You will, for instance, be told immediately when it is Friday.
Monday alone will not be notified week by week in conformity with Mr
Cameron's need to conserve both energy and money.
Friday, 12 November 2010
DOWNTOWN ABYSS
The Ferret is away so catering here is back on a wartime footing. One spoon, one knife, to save washing up, and an endless oxtail eaten from the pan for the same reason.
I expect the friend who sent me the Oxford University Press paperback edition of the incomparable Mrs Beeton’s book on household management meant it kindly. But when I've forgotten to put the rubbish out, the dog is sulking in the waste paper basket and the mice are running riot, recipes that begin “First catch your hare” strike quite the wrong note.
Not that Mrs Beeton would have been unsympathetic to my chaos. She was one of twenty-one children and her mother’s idea of getting them out of the way was to send them to live in the grandstand at Ascot racecourse, where their father was Clerk of the Course. On race days they were farmed out. Yet this amazing lady lived through it happily, at the same time amassing the knowledge that enabled her to write one of the great classic books in the English language.
The instructions to a valet might be copied by a greyhound called Taz to advantage....... “of course subject to their master’s every command. They themselves being subject to erring judgement, aggravated by an imperfect education, their duty leads them to wait upon those who from sheer wealth, station and education are more polished and consequently more susceptible to annoyance.”
The valet must warm the young master’s body linen before the fire, shaving him, washing and combing hair, moustache and beard “where such an appendage is encouraged, arranging the whole simply and gracefully according to the age and style of countenance.”
Heady stuff when you have been wearing your socks so long olfactory gifted hounds can find them.
Mrs Beeton will never be a feminist icon. “Men are so well served out of doors,” she writes, “at their clubs, well-ordered taverns and dining-houses that in order to compete with the attraction of these places a mistress must be thoroughly acquainted with the theory and practise of cookery........there is no more fruitful source of family discontent than a housewife’s badly cooked dinners and untidy ways.”
Labour saving devices include a scullery maid who lights the fire, sweeps and cleans the kitchen, cleans the entrance step, the halls, passages and stairs. Twice a week she washes and scours these places as well as tables, shelves and cupboards. She dresses the nursery and servants’ meals and prepares all meat, poultry and vegetables. You will not wish to hear about the 13-year-old maid of all work in one-servant houses but the recipes are mouth watering.
At Skidmore Prava these tasks are carried out by She Who Must Never Be Obeyed.
Before she left, SWMNBE dropped a domestic bombshell. She announced that she plans to adopt a tiger.
Alas, the dog overheard and I have not known a peaceful moment since. Dogs have a literal mind and the concept of adoption without accommodation is foreign to them. No-one does apprehension like a greyhound.
Belay “Forests of the Night”. So far as Taz is concerned, the “tiger, tiger” is “burning bright” on his sofa in the sitting room which he now enters with great care, rather like the late John Wayne “casing” a saloon. Taz, though his manners are immaculate, though he leaks love which comes off him in warm waves and has two speeds, “Fast” and “Fast Asleep” is not the bravest of dogs. He was traumatised early in life in consequence of being mugged by a robin.
Also he has form where cats are concerned. He largely uses his turn of speed to put the fear of doggy god into the neighbours' cats. Now he is convinced the cats have taken out a contract on him with a giant cat that is going to chase him down the days like the Hound of Heaven .
When he finally plucks up courage and sidles into the sitting room to find an empty sofa, he leaps on it, curls into the smallest conceivable ball, firmly closes his eyes and sinks into a deep sleep. Not undisturbed, it must be said. From time to time he utters little cries as of one pursued by tigers.
Mark my words, no good will come of it.
A NEW ZEALAND CRITIC OF THE PELVIC ORACLE'S CHRONICLE:
“I hesitate to say that Fry, who, alas, did not reach the Olympian heights of playing a grumpy doctor on prime time US television, has his sights fixed on similar pretty pennies. In a way, this is why this book is what was once called a curate's egg: uneven in parts.
When he riffs on his faults - "physical awkwardness, reliance on speech, tendency to choose ironic ruefulness over raw emotion" - he puts his finger on exactly what is missing here. It is all performance, disarming, rueful, sweet, 'candid' and just the teeniest, weeniest little bit of a fake.”
WEBB SIGHT
A young man with an ego which approaches the Great Fry Up is the newest recruit to “Today” on R4, Justin Webb.
The Great Libby Purves, whom God preserve, has wisely said that reading the news is the easiest job on earth. I have done it and the only job I have had which was easier was sweeping out the R.C. Chapel on Jankers.
Newsreaders get a script, an autocue that unrolls at the speed of their speech and a producer in the ear offering advice. Newsreaders not only get paid far too much: they develop enormous egos in inverse ratio to their ability.
Witness James Naughtie on “Today”. By the time this latter day Harry Lauder has finished a question, and on the rare occasions the interviewee gets a word in, the programme is “Tomorrow”.
Naughtie invariably begins the next question by explaining what the interviewee meant by his answer. “I think what you are saying is this...” There is no greater passion than a Scotchman in love with himself, though Webb proves the feeling passes over frontiers.
In a recent interview he announced that ALTHOUGH THE LISTENERS WOULD HATE IT he proposed in future to interrupt the guests more often.
Thus he demonstrates how unimportant listeners are to him and how his ignorance of the techniques of his trade is boundless.
Older listeners will recall that I once fell asleep whilst interviewing a chum on a Radio 4 series. A Russian princess called Masha.
No one noticed and I wasn't going to tell them. When the programme went out letters arrived from listeners saying, “At last a presenter who isn't for ever interrupting.”
Oh, what a tangled Webb..............................
I expect the friend who sent me the Oxford University Press paperback edition of the incomparable Mrs Beeton’s book on household management meant it kindly. But when I've forgotten to put the rubbish out, the dog is sulking in the waste paper basket and the mice are running riot, recipes that begin “First catch your hare” strike quite the wrong note.
Not that Mrs Beeton would have been unsympathetic to my chaos. She was one of twenty-one children and her mother’s idea of getting them out of the way was to send them to live in the grandstand at Ascot racecourse, where their father was Clerk of the Course. On race days they were farmed out. Yet this amazing lady lived through it happily, at the same time amassing the knowledge that enabled her to write one of the great classic books in the English language.
The instructions to a valet might be copied by a greyhound called Taz to advantage....... “of course subject to their master’s every command. They themselves being subject to erring judgement, aggravated by an imperfect education, their duty leads them to wait upon those who from sheer wealth, station and education are more polished and consequently more susceptible to annoyance.”
The valet must warm the young master’s body linen before the fire, shaving him, washing and combing hair, moustache and beard “where such an appendage is encouraged, arranging the whole simply and gracefully according to the age and style of countenance.”
Heady stuff when you have been wearing your socks so long olfactory gifted hounds can find them.
Mrs Beeton will never be a feminist icon. “Men are so well served out of doors,” she writes, “at their clubs, well-ordered taverns and dining-houses that in order to compete with the attraction of these places a mistress must be thoroughly acquainted with the theory and practise of cookery........there is no more fruitful source of family discontent than a housewife’s badly cooked dinners and untidy ways.”
Labour saving devices include a scullery maid who lights the fire, sweeps and cleans the kitchen, cleans the entrance step, the halls, passages and stairs. Twice a week she washes and scours these places as well as tables, shelves and cupboards. She dresses the nursery and servants’ meals and prepares all meat, poultry and vegetables. You will not wish to hear about the 13-year-old maid of all work in one-servant houses but the recipes are mouth watering.
At Skidmore Prava these tasks are carried out by She Who Must Never Be Obeyed.
Before she left, SWMNBE dropped a domestic bombshell. She announced that she plans to adopt a tiger.
Alas, the dog overheard and I have not known a peaceful moment since. Dogs have a literal mind and the concept of adoption without accommodation is foreign to them. No-one does apprehension like a greyhound.
Belay “Forests of the Night”. So far as Taz is concerned, the “tiger, tiger” is “burning bright” on his sofa in the sitting room which he now enters with great care, rather like the late John Wayne “casing” a saloon. Taz, though his manners are immaculate, though he leaks love which comes off him in warm waves and has two speeds, “Fast” and “Fast Asleep” is not the bravest of dogs. He was traumatised early in life in consequence of being mugged by a robin.
Also he has form where cats are concerned. He largely uses his turn of speed to put the fear of doggy god into the neighbours' cats. Now he is convinced the cats have taken out a contract on him with a giant cat that is going to chase him down the days like the Hound of Heaven .
When he finally plucks up courage and sidles into the sitting room to find an empty sofa, he leaps on it, curls into the smallest conceivable ball, firmly closes his eyes and sinks into a deep sleep. Not undisturbed, it must be said. From time to time he utters little cries as of one pursued by tigers.
Mark my words, no good will come of it.
A NEW ZEALAND CRITIC OF THE PELVIC ORACLE'S CHRONICLE:
“I hesitate to say that Fry, who, alas, did not reach the Olympian heights of playing a grumpy doctor on prime time US television, has his sights fixed on similar pretty pennies. In a way, this is why this book is what was once called a curate's egg: uneven in parts.
When he riffs on his faults - "physical awkwardness, reliance on speech, tendency to choose ironic ruefulness over raw emotion" - he puts his finger on exactly what is missing here. It is all performance, disarming, rueful, sweet, 'candid' and just the teeniest, weeniest little bit of a fake.”
WEBB SIGHT
A young man with an ego which approaches the Great Fry Up is the newest recruit to “Today” on R4, Justin Webb.
The Great Libby Purves, whom God preserve, has wisely said that reading the news is the easiest job on earth. I have done it and the only job I have had which was easier was sweeping out the R.C. Chapel on Jankers.
Newsreaders get a script, an autocue that unrolls at the speed of their speech and a producer in the ear offering advice. Newsreaders not only get paid far too much: they develop enormous egos in inverse ratio to their ability.
Witness James Naughtie on “Today”. By the time this latter day Harry Lauder has finished a question, and on the rare occasions the interviewee gets a word in, the programme is “Tomorrow”.
Naughtie invariably begins the next question by explaining what the interviewee meant by his answer. “I think what you are saying is this...” There is no greater passion than a Scotchman in love with himself, though Webb proves the feeling passes over frontiers.
In a recent interview he announced that ALTHOUGH THE LISTENERS WOULD HATE IT he proposed in future to interrupt the guests more often.
Thus he demonstrates how unimportant listeners are to him and how his ignorance of the techniques of his trade is boundless.
Older listeners will recall that I once fell asleep whilst interviewing a chum on a Radio 4 series. A Russian princess called Masha.
No one noticed and I wasn't going to tell them. When the programme went out letters arrived from listeners saying, “At last a presenter who isn't for ever interrupting.”
Oh, what a tangled Webb..............................
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