Saturday, 21 April 2012
NO BOTHER
A funny thing happens to me on the way to a decision. An inner voice says, ”Oh, you don’t want to bother doing that.”
Do other people suffer this persuasive question? Is that what makes some people lazy?
My wife has a voice which says “No slacking” and another meant for me “Brisk your whiskers!” Which explains why she is in perpetual motion and makes it a thing of wonder that we are still together since I paid 7/6 for her forty-two years ago.
It might explain why at the age of nearly 83 I bought my first mobile phone last week.
Mind you, I am not alone. There is a chap in India who feels exactly the same. He is one of the helpful chaps on Orange Customer Service who advises mobile phone customers. I spent days trying to get my Sim card to stay in place. In a way of explanation I said to him, “I don’t suppose you get many customers who bought a mobile phone at the age of 82?”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, “I’ve never had one...”
I said: “I thought working for a mobile phone company you would have to...”
And he said: “That is what my wife says. She says I should have it on so she would know where I am. I don’t always want her to know where I am...”
IT’S A FLABULOUS LIFE
At 21 stone I am two people so I am never lonely. That is only one of the advantages of obesity. I do not know why it has such a bad press. My obesity is a puzzle. I drink no more than a glass of wine with my only real meal, which is lunch. For breakfast I eat fruit and for supper three Ryvita butties which taste like roofing felt.
My problem is genetic. I am reaching 83 but it hasn’t shortened my life. Obesity is probably the cause of my diabetes but don’t knock it. I am eleven stone overweight so I don’t have to wear a seatbelt. I walk with difficulty so I have a Blue Badge which means I can wield a hosepipe till the cows come home, I can park anywhere and I get the key to the disabled lavatories which are always cleaner and larger than those restricted to the hoi polloi. I get free prescriptions. I might lose a leg or go blind but at my age it won’t be for long and I am in no doubt there will be more perks. In the meantime my bulk assures me of preferential treatment in restaurants and respect from Maitre Ds.
Caesar preferred my sort to those with a lean and hungry look and I cannot find it in my heart to blame him. I may have recurring cancer but I will never know - I am too fat to fit in a scanner. It has been suggested I use the scanner they use for racehorses at the vet clinic in Newmarket where Taz had a broken leg mended. But that cost £6,000. God knows what they will charge a human being.
ELF AND SAFETY
A retired health and safety lecturer was crushed to death while dismantling a garden shed because he thought it was 'dangerous', an inquest heard.
Austin Mitchell, 74, was helping his neighbour Ada Ellis in her back garden when he was killed.
The wooden shed in Whissonsett, near Fakenham, Norfolk, had previously been used as a pigeon loft and was covered in debris.
Mr Mitchell had advised his neighbour that it was dangerous and volunteered to help out.
AND SO SAY MOST OF US...
His BBC colleagues John Humphrys, Jeremy Vine and Len Goodman may have been fronting shows over the weekend commemorating the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, but Andrew Marr charted his own course, reports the Mail. "We are treating it as a national celebration. Are we going to be doing this for air crashes in future?" he asked on his BBC2 Sunday show. "I think it is sordid and tasteless and very dull and I hope after today we won't hear any more about this sad story except from the driest of dry historians." With ITV drama Titanic plunging in the ratings, it looks like viewers share Marr's sinking feeling.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
And every other day for Bailey, the terrier who owns our gardener Don Hipkin. On Monday he dines on tongue, Tuesday cottage pie, Wednesday and Thursday chicken, Friday cottage pie, Saturday two burgers without bread. And Sunday? A joint and two veg, of course. What else? He breakfasts on sausages, barking to request the number required. He snacks every day on high protein dog food and his pills are always buried in a morsel of sponge cake.
He is seventeen. So much for doggie diets.
HOME TO ROOST
THE British National Party candidate for Liverpool mayor Mike Whitby is only eligible to stand in the election because he rents a redundant pigeon shed in the city. Mike Whitby, who claims to put “local people first”, is also standing for a seat on Wrexham council on May 3. As Mr Whitby lives in North Wales he must own property or have business interests in Liverpool to stand for mayor. On his nomination papers he cites that he rents a “storage facility” at the Cricketers’Club in Wavertree.
FAMILY MATTERS
Our cousin Isabel Suckling, the choirgirl whose debut album came fourth in the favourites list on Classic FM, continues to make the headlines. After her appearance with mentor Aled Jones singing in Robin Gibbs’s “Titanic Requiem” the “Tatler“ was ecstatic.
“Everyone at the Titanic Requiem concert last night talked about two things: How beautiful the music was (there were quite a few people in Central Hall reaching for tissues) and how wonderful singer Isabel Suckling is. Isn't Isabel beautiful? Isn't Isabel talented? Conversation was basically Isabel obsessed. In between chatting, everyone congratulated RJ Gibb on the concert (he jointly composed all of the music performed with his father Robin) and Aled Jones on his rendition of new song Daybreak (he was backed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra). After the concert, guests - including RJ's mother Edwina - trotted to the bar for wine, champagne and canapes.”
I HOPE IT’S THE END PIECE...
We are closing care homes and public lavatories and the surfaces of our main roads need urgent repairs. So naturally we are giving £2 billion, even though we are not members of the Euro, to those Europeans countries so corrupt and profligate they are mired in debt. And is anyone surprised that the Royal Family, though they are vociferously opposed to wind turbines, is getting extra revenue by building a turbine forest on Crown Estate la
Saturday, 14 April 2012
DOUBLE CROSS TALK
I will be 83 shortly and too near the swinging of the Pearly Gates to ‘scape bruising. Yet I remain convinced the Creator is unknowable and that mankind invented gods to explain climate change. In earliest Peru, in Greece, even in cynical Rome, gods wielded forked lightning, evoked thunder, inspired tsunamis and started wars. The sudden rush of more sophisticated religions in 5 BC used fairy tales as a way of upholding tribal discipline. That said I stand at the barricades shoulder to shoulder with a former Archbishop of Canterbury defending the right of Xtians to wear the cross, the symbol of their belief, and for their right to talk and behave towards Muslims and Homosexuals as freely as they behave towards us. Even though I have little wonder that religion is losing its grip in the Western world when it continues to rely on myth.
In the less sophisticated East discipline is rewarded with gifts of spectral virgins. Or a handful of nuts - for vegetarians presumably. Yet even here the grip is loosening on all but the Wahabi-inspired zealots. In his book “Shadow of the Sword. The Battle for the Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World“ I read that historian Tim Holland disputes the Muslim belief that the Koran is literally the word of God handed down to Muhammad. He points out the Koran existed many years before the Prophet’s birth but the edition which has become the global version, he argues, was published as recently as 1924.
Nor does he believe Mecca was the place where Muhammad was born. Multiple references to cattle and olive trees which would not flourish in such a dry place suggest a site further north.
The most heartening aspect of this inquiry is that Omar Bakri Muhammad, the Muslimist who threatened the West with 9/11 every day, commented on the book:
“People are entitled to write the books they like as long as they do not insult the honour of the prophet... He can say he does not believe or even that the prophet does not exist and Muslims will just laugh. It’s all in the scriptures.”
Not all religions take such a relaxed view. A devout Jew Peter Beinhart has published “The Crisis of Zionism “in which he warns Israel will have to decide whether to be a Jewish state or a democracy.” Its occupation of the West Bank and aggressive settlement building there means that Israel is two countries”, he writes, “a democratic one in the West where Arab and Israeli citizens can vote and move easily as near equals, and a non-democratic one on the West Bank where Palestinians are cut out of any democratic governance “.
This fairly obvious statement has produced a vitriolic response from the Zionist establishment. Beinhart is accused of being one-sided, part of a privileged elite, and haughty. The Head of the Anti- Defamation League Abraham Foxman claims that a boycott of the West Bank will only worsen the anti Israeli campaign round the world which Beinhart opposes.
WATER, WATER NOWHERE.......
The Ferret runs a pretty tight ship. If called on she would water our garden with a teaspoon. She would not accept that my infirmities give me freedom of the hosepipe.
So hotly was my position attacked that it forced itself into my dreams. I dreamt I had rung Anglian Water for confirmation of the Blue Badge exemption. No sooner had I put down the phone that it rang again. A lady with a most beguiling accent announced she was from Wasser-Deutsch. She said she was sending me a four page questionnaire to assess my need. She then went on to list the questions in great detail and warned me of the consequences of not answering fully and truthfully within seven days. I have long accepted that Germany won World War 2 so I was anxious that I should comply. Most of the questions I could answer but I was worried about the ones that required me to stand in the first available water and measure how far it came up my leg. Ours is not to reason why but just to say “Heil“ and comply instantly. But I was in bed in my nightshirt. How could I answer the question truthfully? It would be difficult enough to fill in the form when I had only blankets on which to rest it. And what of the water test? Am I to stand in water in my bedroom? And if I found any within the seven days allowed for the return of the form do I raise my nightshirt higher than modesty permits to measure against bare skin or would the nightshirt perform an adequate platform against which to measure?
So powerful was my dilemma that I woke convinced that the phone call had happened and lay for several tense minutes worrying until it struck me that I was arguing at a time of drought. Why would I need to stand in water?
Bloody Krauts, I said, and went to stand in the shower with a curious elation that I had beat the Germans at their own game and would fill in the form satirically. I just hope that won’t bring the Gestapo knocking on my door. But would they be permitted to use the Water Torture a teaspoon at a time?
ANNIVERSARY BLUES
Were she still living, my mother would have been 111 on March 10. I scoured the papers, listened to all the bulletins - not a single mention of my old lady.
So why have the media showered us with films and stories about the Titanic, an unsinkable ship that went down on its maiden voyage? Why ever would we want to be reminded of poor seamanship and a shipbuilding failure?
21st CENTURY GIVING
“Philanthropists aren’t going to give money if they are not offered incentives”- multi millionaire on R4.
Actually contemporary philanthropists give with agenda. They reduce their tax bill by their gift. A true philanthropist does not look for incentives. He gives part of his income AFTER tax.
JOIN ME IN THE MADHOUSE
A panel set up to expose health and safety farces was facing ridicule last night after it failed to come to a decision on the seagull in the pond case – and said it could be five days before it did.
The Myth Busters Challenge Panel could not decide whether 25 firemen being told they could not wade into shallow water to save the bird constituted a misinterpretation of the rules.
The Daily Mail contacted the panel at 3pm. But despite being given a whole afternoon to mull it over and it being only the fifth inquiry since the panel’s launch a day before, it failed to give an answer.
Instead the body sent a weak assurance at 6pm that their experts would ‘consider’ the case – and later added that it could be a full five days before they came to a ruling on the matter.
Myth Busters said: ‘We are grateful to have this incident referred to us and will now check the facts of the situation, including if and why that number of firefighters were called to rescue one bird.
‘The Challenge Panel will consider it and give a view. Last night, the panel, set up by the Health and Safety Executive watchdog, was labelled a waste of space’ after failing to reach a decision on a case which was condemned widely as a farce.Each case is considered via the HSE website’s complaints page, by the panel members with the most relevant knowledge.But none of the cases presented to the panel since its launch have so far been resolved.
END NOTE:
Churchill used his mother shamelessly to advance his career. This unattractive trait provoked this , from his friend Lloyd George; “Churchill would use his mother’s skin for a drumhead to beat and sound his praises.”
In the less sophisticated East discipline is rewarded with gifts of spectral virgins. Or a handful of nuts - for vegetarians presumably. Yet even here the grip is loosening on all but the Wahabi-inspired zealots. In his book “Shadow of the Sword. The Battle for the Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World“ I read that historian Tim Holland disputes the Muslim belief that the Koran is literally the word of God handed down to Muhammad. He points out the Koran existed many years before the Prophet’s birth but the edition which has become the global version, he argues, was published as recently as 1924.
Nor does he believe Mecca was the place where Muhammad was born. Multiple references to cattle and olive trees which would not flourish in such a dry place suggest a site further north.
The most heartening aspect of this inquiry is that Omar Bakri Muhammad, the Muslimist who threatened the West with 9/11 every day, commented on the book:
“People are entitled to write the books they like as long as they do not insult the honour of the prophet... He can say he does not believe or even that the prophet does not exist and Muslims will just laugh. It’s all in the scriptures.”
Not all religions take such a relaxed view. A devout Jew Peter Beinhart has published “The Crisis of Zionism “in which he warns Israel will have to decide whether to be a Jewish state or a democracy.” Its occupation of the West Bank and aggressive settlement building there means that Israel is two countries”, he writes, “a democratic one in the West where Arab and Israeli citizens can vote and move easily as near equals, and a non-democratic one on the West Bank where Palestinians are cut out of any democratic governance “.
This fairly obvious statement has produced a vitriolic response from the Zionist establishment. Beinhart is accused of being one-sided, part of a privileged elite, and haughty. The Head of the Anti- Defamation League Abraham Foxman claims that a boycott of the West Bank will only worsen the anti Israeli campaign round the world which Beinhart opposes.
WATER, WATER NOWHERE.......
The Ferret runs a pretty tight ship. If called on she would water our garden with a teaspoon. She would not accept that my infirmities give me freedom of the hosepipe.
So hotly was my position attacked that it forced itself into my dreams. I dreamt I had rung Anglian Water for confirmation of the Blue Badge exemption. No sooner had I put down the phone that it rang again. A lady with a most beguiling accent announced she was from Wasser-Deutsch. She said she was sending me a four page questionnaire to assess my need. She then went on to list the questions in great detail and warned me of the consequences of not answering fully and truthfully within seven days. I have long accepted that Germany won World War 2 so I was anxious that I should comply. Most of the questions I could answer but I was worried about the ones that required me to stand in the first available water and measure how far it came up my leg. Ours is not to reason why but just to say “Heil“ and comply instantly. But I was in bed in my nightshirt. How could I answer the question truthfully? It would be difficult enough to fill in the form when I had only blankets on which to rest it. And what of the water test? Am I to stand in water in my bedroom? And if I found any within the seven days allowed for the return of the form do I raise my nightshirt higher than modesty permits to measure against bare skin or would the nightshirt perform an adequate platform against which to measure?
So powerful was my dilemma that I woke convinced that the phone call had happened and lay for several tense minutes worrying until it struck me that I was arguing at a time of drought. Why would I need to stand in water?
Bloody Krauts, I said, and went to stand in the shower with a curious elation that I had beat the Germans at their own game and would fill in the form satirically. I just hope that won’t bring the Gestapo knocking on my door. But would they be permitted to use the Water Torture a teaspoon at a time?
ANNIVERSARY BLUES
Were she still living, my mother would have been 111 on March 10. I scoured the papers, listened to all the bulletins - not a single mention of my old lady.
So why have the media showered us with films and stories about the Titanic, an unsinkable ship that went down on its maiden voyage? Why ever would we want to be reminded of poor seamanship and a shipbuilding failure?
21st CENTURY GIVING
“Philanthropists aren’t going to give money if they are not offered incentives”- multi millionaire on R4.
Actually contemporary philanthropists give with agenda. They reduce their tax bill by their gift. A true philanthropist does not look for incentives. He gives part of his income AFTER tax.
JOIN ME IN THE MADHOUSE
A panel set up to expose health and safety farces was facing ridicule last night after it failed to come to a decision on the seagull in the pond case – and said it could be five days before it did.
The Myth Busters Challenge Panel could not decide whether 25 firemen being told they could not wade into shallow water to save the bird constituted a misinterpretation of the rules.
The Daily Mail contacted the panel at 3pm. But despite being given a whole afternoon to mull it over and it being only the fifth inquiry since the panel’s launch a day before, it failed to give an answer.
Instead the body sent a weak assurance at 6pm that their experts would ‘consider’ the case – and later added that it could be a full five days before they came to a ruling on the matter.
Myth Busters said: ‘We are grateful to have this incident referred to us and will now check the facts of the situation, including if and why that number of firefighters were called to rescue one bird.
‘The Challenge Panel will consider it and give a view. Last night, the panel, set up by the Health and Safety Executive watchdog, was labelled a waste of space’ after failing to reach a decision on a case which was condemned widely as a farce.Each case is considered via the HSE website’s complaints page, by the panel members with the most relevant knowledge.But none of the cases presented to the panel since its launch have so far been resolved.
END NOTE:
Churchill used his mother shamelessly to advance his career. This unattractive trait provoked this , from his friend Lloyd George; “Churchill would use his mother’s skin for a drumhead to beat and sound his praises.”
Saturday, 7 April 2012
FAINT DAVIDS DAY
David Frost has been telling us at length how to interview, with illustrations of some of the worst examples by so-called star interviewers.
I did my first published interview on VE Day in 1945. For the next half century scarcely a day passed when I didn’t do one for radio, TV or newspapers. My books are extended interviews with people or other books; yet it took me forty years to become an interviewer.
I may have mentioned that I once fell asleep in the middle of an interview for a Radio 4 series. For the first and only time in my life the office was inundated with letters praising my interviewing technique. At last, they all said, an interviewer who isn’t forever interrupting.
To be truthful, I could never take TV interviews seriously after my first experience on an arts programme in Cardiff with Gwen, the poet Vernon Watkins’ widow. Neither of us could believe that we were required to rehearse our interviews. The producer Gwyn Erfyl explained: “If the interviewer doesn’t know what you are going to say, how could he know what to answer?”
I was to go on to make a weekly half hour radio interview for a decade. Although I did hours of research I deliberately never knew what I was going to ask my guests until the programme began. That is why I think of TV interviewers as actors. The only real interviews are on radio. Libby Purves and Eddie Mair are my favourites. Neither hectors their guests and both elicit the best answers.
The Today programme is the nest of the worst so I was sad to read in the RT that Evan Davis thinks his gentle questioning lets his guests “off the hook“. Which is more than can be said of headmistressy Sarah Montague and prolix Naughtie (who not only asks rambling questions but insists on parroting the answers), attack dog Humphrys and his petulant puppy Justin Webb.
Received radio wisdom is that answers should be kept short. Otherwise listeners get bored. Rubbish. Interview questions are spurs in the flank of monologues. The interviewer is the jockey - a sort of horseman of the puckered lip. If you can see him, even in your mind’s eye, he has failed.
On Radio Wales and R4 Vincent Kane was a superlative interviewer. He left space for answers. So did a man called Gerry Monte and, though his strength is aggressive sycophancy, starstruck Michael Parkinson and quirky Ray Gosling were the best of a bad bunch on TV.
Nowadays the interviewer is the star. His questions swirl like a matador’s red cape as he taunts the “bull” in a suit of too bright lights...I do sometimes wish they could fall asleep and give the other chap a chance. We don’t get interviews: we get cross talk acts between John Humphrys and various elephantine politicians; even crosser talk acts between Paxman’s eyebrows and more politicians, though Boris Johnson and both Lord Bell and George Galloway wiped the floor with him this week. But these ineffectual interrogators never seem to elicit any information.
Are the broadcast media anyway right to concentrate almost exclusively on politics? I know it is cheap to do but I don’t know anyone who listens enthralled. Perhaps I am also wrong in believing that interviewing should not be part of the entertainment industry, which it has plainly become. I would have thought that if satellite news bulletins and the barely live ‘Five’ proved anything they prove there isn’t enough news about - or news they can afford to get -to nourish a rolling news coverage. The reason the first popular newspapers included features is that there wasn’t enough news to fill a paper big enough for people to buy. In the old days BBC announcers would sometimes come on, announce the nine o’ clock news and say: “There is no news today. Goodnight.”
Isn’t news just another fix anyway? We are used to getting it at stated times like the six o’ clock gin of happy memory; and we think we can’t do without it. Even more depressing, we are now copying things like the Oompah Whimpering show where you manufacture news by bringing together stage villains or antagonists and invite them to fight whilst the audience boos and cheers.
*************************************
DAVIDS WHERE ART THOU?
It would be difficult to have faith in our major parties when one considers the appalling mess they made in choosing their leaders. Labour chose the wrong brother whilst the Tories based their choice on one speech at the Conference. David Davies has all the assets Cameron so conspicuously lacks. Impeccable working class background, considerable experience of life in the real world, leadership skills honed in the SAS and a liberal dose of common sense. Cameron went from Eton to Oxford and from Oxford to politics. He is said to have experience of PR. Only in the conservative party back rooms which is not the most shining nursery for skill in the Dark Arts.
I did my first published interview on VE Day in 1945. For the next half century scarcely a day passed when I didn’t do one for radio, TV or newspapers. My books are extended interviews with people or other books; yet it took me forty years to become an interviewer.
I may have mentioned that I once fell asleep in the middle of an interview for a Radio 4 series. For the first and only time in my life the office was inundated with letters praising my interviewing technique. At last, they all said, an interviewer who isn’t forever interrupting.
To be truthful, I could never take TV interviews seriously after my first experience on an arts programme in Cardiff with Gwen, the poet Vernon Watkins’ widow. Neither of us could believe that we were required to rehearse our interviews. The producer Gwyn Erfyl explained: “If the interviewer doesn’t know what you are going to say, how could he know what to answer?”
I was to go on to make a weekly half hour radio interview for a decade. Although I did hours of research I deliberately never knew what I was going to ask my guests until the programme began. That is why I think of TV interviewers as actors. The only real interviews are on radio. Libby Purves and Eddie Mair are my favourites. Neither hectors their guests and both elicit the best answers.
The Today programme is the nest of the worst so I was sad to read in the RT that Evan Davis thinks his gentle questioning lets his guests “off the hook“. Which is more than can be said of headmistressy Sarah Montague and prolix Naughtie (who not only asks rambling questions but insists on parroting the answers), attack dog Humphrys and his petulant puppy Justin Webb.
Received radio wisdom is that answers should be kept short. Otherwise listeners get bored. Rubbish. Interview questions are spurs in the flank of monologues. The interviewer is the jockey - a sort of horseman of the puckered lip. If you can see him, even in your mind’s eye, he has failed.
On Radio Wales and R4 Vincent Kane was a superlative interviewer. He left space for answers. So did a man called Gerry Monte and, though his strength is aggressive sycophancy, starstruck Michael Parkinson and quirky Ray Gosling were the best of a bad bunch on TV.
Nowadays the interviewer is the star. His questions swirl like a matador’s red cape as he taunts the “bull” in a suit of too bright lights...I do sometimes wish they could fall asleep and give the other chap a chance. We don’t get interviews: we get cross talk acts between John Humphrys and various elephantine politicians; even crosser talk acts between Paxman’s eyebrows and more politicians, though Boris Johnson and both Lord Bell and George Galloway wiped the floor with him this week. But these ineffectual interrogators never seem to elicit any information.
Are the broadcast media anyway right to concentrate almost exclusively on politics? I know it is cheap to do but I don’t know anyone who listens enthralled. Perhaps I am also wrong in believing that interviewing should not be part of the entertainment industry, which it has plainly become. I would have thought that if satellite news bulletins and the barely live ‘Five’ proved anything they prove there isn’t enough news about - or news they can afford to get -to nourish a rolling news coverage. The reason the first popular newspapers included features is that there wasn’t enough news to fill a paper big enough for people to buy. In the old days BBC announcers would sometimes come on, announce the nine o’ clock news and say: “There is no news today. Goodnight.”
Isn’t news just another fix anyway? We are used to getting it at stated times like the six o’ clock gin of happy memory; and we think we can’t do without it. Even more depressing, we are now copying things like the Oompah Whimpering show where you manufacture news by bringing together stage villains or antagonists and invite them to fight whilst the audience boos and cheers.
*************************************
DAVIDS WHERE ART THOU?
It would be difficult to have faith in our major parties when one considers the appalling mess they made in choosing their leaders. Labour chose the wrong brother whilst the Tories based their choice on one speech at the Conference. David Davies has all the assets Cameron so conspicuously lacks. Impeccable working class background, considerable experience of life in the real world, leadership skills honed in the SAS and a liberal dose of common sense. Cameron went from Eton to Oxford and from Oxford to politics. He is said to have experience of PR. Only in the conservative party back rooms which is not the most shining nursery for skill in the Dark Arts.
Friday, 30 March 2012
hang my galloway high
In his fine poem “The
Maimed Debauchee”, Lord Rochester wrote. "So, when my days of impotence approach,
And I’m by pox and wine’s unlucky chance
Forced from the pleasing billows of debauch
On the dull shore of lazy temperance,
Past joys have more than paid what I endure "
Thank goodness he didn’t have to endure this maladjusted Establishment that plunges us into one unnecessary war after another, an Establishment which, no doubt, has poor Polonius –“Neither a borrower nor a lender be” – spinning in his grave; yet presumes to tell us how much we should drink and smoke.
Fifteen years ago my income plunged to a couple of hundred a week but
it didn’t stop my craving for drink. I brewed a very decent beer for tuppence a
pint and found a source for bootleg gin at a fiver a bottle.
The feral young of today won’t be put off by an increase of two quid on half a bottle of vodka. They only drink on Fridays and Saturdays and that won’t change when the only place you can buy cheap booze is in the bars of the Palace of Westminster. Homemade beer kits will produce a drinkable,strong beer; and there are enough illicit stills springing up in our immigrantcolonies which provide vodka at a shilling a tot. In Wisbech, near here, there are lorries making weekly deliveries.
The Establishment says the success of the smoking ban proves that their regulations work. The smoking ban in pubs has dramatically improved health, it boasts. As
Christopher Booker has pointed out, one study after another has shown that
health risks from passive smoking are non-existent. One 1998 study concluded
that regular exposure to "environmental smoke" is equivalent to
smoking six cigarettes a year.
A seven-year study for the World Health Organisation the same year found the risk
of cancer from passive smoking was "statistically insignificant". Yet
if you look on the WHO website they now warn that passive smoking is a health
risk.
The largest study, based on 118,000 Californians between 1960 and 1998 and
published in the British Medical Journal in 2003, confirmed that smokers had a
"higher than average risk of mortality", but found their partners
were unaffected.
The anti-smoking lobby squealed at such unwelcome findings. But the most
conspicuous effort to refute them, by Professor Nicholas Wald, was found to
have been largely based on studies carried out in Japan and China, where the
epidemiology of lung cancer is quite different from that in the West.
Some years ago the Establishment warned us not to drink more than four units of
alcohol. Since then, one of the members of the Royal College of Physicians' original working party has admitted the figures were "plucked out of the air" in the
absence of any clear evidence about how much alcohol constitutes a risk to
health.
Richard Smith, a former editor of the British Medical Journal and a member of the College's working party on alcohol, recalled that the committee could find "no decent
data" on the subject, but felt obliged to make a recommendation nonetheless.
He said: "They weren't really based on any firm evidence at all. It was a sort of intelligent guess by a committee."
Yet last week all this hard evidence was happily swept aside by the Gadarene rush
of the self-righteous. It didn’t prevent the Government telling how few units
will wreck our health. It also warned us that if we drink three glasses of wine
a day we have a fifty per cent chance of developing breast cancer. Its advice is, presumably,based on those discredited recommendations of yesteryear.
Columnist Dominic Lawson perceptively points out that the disgraceful brawling in the House of Commons bars has not been linked to the cut price booze offered there. Gooses, Ganders and sauce spring to mind.
The R4 programme “More or Less” discovered the number of units of alcohol consumed by the average British adult has dropped by 20 per cent over the past five years.
Why is the Establishment so gloomy? From Beijing to Bratislava, more of us are living longer, healthier and more comfortable lives than at any time in history; fewer of us are suffering from poverty, hunger or illiteracy. Pestilence, famine, death and even war, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, are in retreat. My advice? Eat, drink eat and be merry.
Rochester put it so much better:
“I will such heat inspire,
As to important mischief shall incline.
I'll make them long some ancient church to fire,
And fear no lewdness they're called to by wine.
Thus statesman-like, I'll saucily impose,
And safe from danger valiantly advise,
Sheltered in impotence, urge you to blows,
And being good for nothing else, be wise..
My pains at least some respite shall afford
While I behold the battles you maintain
\Vhen fleets of glasses sail about the board,
From whose broadsides volleys of wit shall rain.
Nor let the sight of honourable scars,
Which my too forward valour did procure,
Frighten new-listed soldiers from the wars:
*****************************
MINISTRY OF Doohhh
The navy’s newest ship, the offshore support vessel Skandi Bergen, cannot be sent
to war. The civilian crew is not insured for battle.
UNFIT FOR PURPOSE
We are contemplating war with the Falklands, nuclear war between Israel and the
Arabs; the UK has an underclass which has little chance of escape from poverty
and an underground army of feral looters; massive changes are underway to a Welfare
State we have never been able to afford. And what is concerning Her Majesty’s
Opposition? How many members of the cabinet are millionaires; whether the Prime Minister hacked out on a policehorse; whether Cornish pasties should attract VAT; dinners for donors and whereand when the PM last ate a pasty. And the Government? They are advising us to store highly inflammable petrol in our garages and provoking panic over a strike by tanker drivers which may never happen. Now it looks as though it’s all down to George Galloway, a teetotaler, alas, but someone who can talk
brilliantly and walk about at the same time.
Of one thing we can be sure. None of the three major parties is fit to govern us.
They should pay us to get as drunk as they often are.
Maimed Debauchee”, Lord Rochester wrote. "So, when my days of impotence approach,
And I’m by pox and wine’s unlucky chance
Forced from the pleasing billows of debauch
On the dull shore of lazy temperance,
Past joys have more than paid what I endure "
Thank goodness he didn’t have to endure this maladjusted Establishment that plunges us into one unnecessary war after another, an Establishment which, no doubt, has poor Polonius –“Neither a borrower nor a lender be” – spinning in his grave; yet presumes to tell us how much we should drink and smoke.
Fifteen years ago my income plunged to a couple of hundred a week but
it didn’t stop my craving for drink. I brewed a very decent beer for tuppence a
pint and found a source for bootleg gin at a fiver a bottle.
The feral young of today won’t be put off by an increase of two quid on half a bottle of vodka. They only drink on Fridays and Saturdays and that won’t change when the only place you can buy cheap booze is in the bars of the Palace of Westminster. Homemade beer kits will produce a drinkable,strong beer; and there are enough illicit stills springing up in our immigrantcolonies which provide vodka at a shilling a tot. In Wisbech, near here, there are lorries making weekly deliveries.
The Establishment says the success of the smoking ban proves that their regulations work. The smoking ban in pubs has dramatically improved health, it boasts. As
Christopher Booker has pointed out, one study after another has shown that
health risks from passive smoking are non-existent. One 1998 study concluded
that regular exposure to "environmental smoke" is equivalent to
smoking six cigarettes a year.
A seven-year study for the World Health Organisation the same year found the risk
of cancer from passive smoking was "statistically insignificant". Yet
if you look on the WHO website they now warn that passive smoking is a health
risk.
The largest study, based on 118,000 Californians between 1960 and 1998 and
published in the British Medical Journal in 2003, confirmed that smokers had a
"higher than average risk of mortality", but found their partners
were unaffected.
The anti-smoking lobby squealed at such unwelcome findings. But the most
conspicuous effort to refute them, by Professor Nicholas Wald, was found to
have been largely based on studies carried out in Japan and China, where the
epidemiology of lung cancer is quite different from that in the West.
Some years ago the Establishment warned us not to drink more than four units of
alcohol. Since then, one of the members of the Royal College of Physicians' original working party has admitted the figures were "plucked out of the air" in the
absence of any clear evidence about how much alcohol constitutes a risk to
health.
Richard Smith, a former editor of the British Medical Journal and a member of the College's working party on alcohol, recalled that the committee could find "no decent
data" on the subject, but felt obliged to make a recommendation nonetheless.
He said: "They weren't really based on any firm evidence at all. It was a sort of intelligent guess by a committee."
Yet last week all this hard evidence was happily swept aside by the Gadarene rush
of the self-righteous. It didn’t prevent the Government telling how few units
will wreck our health. It also warned us that if we drink three glasses of wine
a day we have a fifty per cent chance of developing breast cancer. Its advice is, presumably,based on those discredited recommendations of yesteryear.
Columnist Dominic Lawson perceptively points out that the disgraceful brawling in the House of Commons bars has not been linked to the cut price booze offered there. Gooses, Ganders and sauce spring to mind.
The R4 programme “More or Less” discovered the number of units of alcohol consumed by the average British adult has dropped by 20 per cent over the past five years.
Why is the Establishment so gloomy? From Beijing to Bratislava, more of us are living longer, healthier and more comfortable lives than at any time in history; fewer of us are suffering from poverty, hunger or illiteracy. Pestilence, famine, death and even war, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, are in retreat. My advice? Eat, drink eat and be merry.
Rochester put it so much better:
“I will such heat inspire,
As to important mischief shall incline.
I'll make them long some ancient church to fire,
And fear no lewdness they're called to by wine.
Thus statesman-like, I'll saucily impose,
And safe from danger valiantly advise,
Sheltered in impotence, urge you to blows,
And being good for nothing else, be wise..
My pains at least some respite shall afford
While I behold the battles you maintain
\Vhen fleets of glasses sail about the board,
From whose broadsides volleys of wit shall rain.
Nor let the sight of honourable scars,
Which my too forward valour did procure,
Frighten new-listed soldiers from the wars:
*****************************
MINISTRY OF Doohhh
The navy’s newest ship, the offshore support vessel Skandi Bergen, cannot be sent
to war. The civilian crew is not insured for battle.
UNFIT FOR PURPOSE
We are contemplating war with the Falklands, nuclear war between Israel and the
Arabs; the UK has an underclass which has little chance of escape from poverty
and an underground army of feral looters; massive changes are underway to a Welfare
State we have never been able to afford. And what is concerning Her Majesty’s
Opposition? How many members of the cabinet are millionaires; whether the Prime Minister hacked out on a policehorse; whether Cornish pasties should attract VAT; dinners for donors and whereand when the PM last ate a pasty. And the Government? They are advising us to store highly inflammable petrol in our garages and provoking panic over a strike by tanker drivers which may never happen. Now it looks as though it’s all down to George Galloway, a teetotaler, alas, but someone who can talk
brilliantly and walk about at the same time.
Of one thing we can be sure. None of the three major parties is fit to govern us.
They should pay us to get as drunk as they often are.
Friday, 23 March 2012
LIFTING THE VEIL
A Muslim juror refuses to remove her veil and a judge allows her to stand down. This is a clear case of contempt of court. Why isn't she in prison?
My objection to immigrants has nothing to do with race. My family were Norman for a thousand years. In the last fifty years they have added, Irish, Welsh, Scottish, Jewish, Catholic, Saxon,Cambodian, Italian and German. I am a Buddhist. I was born in Lancashire of Scottish stock. I lived briefly in Liverpool, in Wales for thirty years,Yorkshire for ten. Now I live in the Fens which has become Mittel Europa.
What I object to is the refusal of many immigrants to integrate. If they come to Britain presumably they are attracted to our way of life. So why do they try so hard to change it?
That is not true of all immigrants. The Royal Regiment of Scotland is kept up to strength by blacks. In my own regiment they prove themselves again and again. In Afghanistan they were called out to rescue the SAS.
Twenty SAS men and 30 Afghan troops on a special mission had become pinned down after their Chinook was crippled by a fault. Alpha Company of the 3rd Battalion Royal Regiment of Scotland (Black Watch) drove back the Taliban, who swarmed from surrounding mountains to attack the out-numbered SAS.
Former head of the Army General Sir Mike Jackson stressed last night that five of the soldiers from Alpha Company's No 1 Platoon were black - showing BNP racists who have tried to hijack Britain's military heritage are out of touch. - M.O.D despatch.
A Welsh extremist website once honoured me with the title of Traitor of the Week. I shared it rather puzzlingly with Ryan Griggs, S4C, Radio Cymru, the Welsh Language Society, the Welsh Language Board and a very nice man called Jonesy who was a Radio Cymru presenter.
I am not a nationalist. Nationalism is a road which ends at the gates
of Auschwitz and we have had a lot of trouble with it in our family.You may recall my Auntie Jeannie was the widow of Uncle Tommy, a Scottish
Nationalist so incandescent that ten years after his death she was still afraid to visit England.
Her son-in-law Jackie, who looked after the boats of the Emir of Kuwait, invited Auntie Jeannie to visit.
"It's no in England, is it?" she inquired fearfully.
In the event, she had a great time, including supper with the Emir in his palace. She was not impressed.
"Does he aye get his dinner on tin plates?" she asked Jackie.
"They're no tin," whispered Jackie, "they're real gold."
"Maks nae difference," said my Auntie Jeannie. "Puir man,
ye cannae keep food hot on tin plates."
The day she got home she went to an Edinburgh market and bought the Emir a six-piece china dinner service.
Alas, we have lost the charming letter of thanks the Emir sent.
My Auntie Jeannie was the Great Imperturbable.
The nearest thing we had in our family to a tradition was the
Hogmanay Fight. My father emigrated to Manchester but
always returned home to Edinburgh on 30 December. He went a day
early to get in training for the whisky drinking marathon which was the family New Year.
By tea time on Old Year's Night whisky had washed away any
seasonal goodwill. By 9 pm naked hostility had replaced it, my
father invariably igniting it by taking out a provocative cigar.
"Bloody Englishman," growled Uncle Tommy, socialist
principles enflamed at the sight of such a capitalist
accessory.
"That makes bliddy two of us," my father would reply every
year.
Uncle Tommy's darkest secret was that he, the
most passionately Scottish of the family, had been born
during a brief visit by his mother to Lancashire.
Blows were exchanged. Three step-brothers, Jimmy and Matty
and Alec who tried to join the row, were rebuffed by Uncle
Tommy on the grounds they weren't family. This made Jimmy and Matty and Alec madder than anyone.
Whilst five brothers fought in the middle of the room, the
wives moved their chairs to the wall and continued their
conversation.Auntie Jeannie served tea.
At 11.45 pm she would say, "Tommy, have you seen the time?"
The fight ended at once and quarter of an hour later the
brothers had their arms round each other and were singing
Auld Lang Syne.
They don't make Hogmanays like that anymore. Or Auntie
Jeannies.
My objection to immigrants has nothing to do with race. My family were Norman for a thousand years. In the last fifty years they have added, Irish, Welsh, Scottish, Jewish, Catholic, Saxon,Cambodian, Italian and German. I am a Buddhist. I was born in Lancashire of Scottish stock. I lived briefly in Liverpool, in Wales for thirty years,Yorkshire for ten. Now I live in the Fens which has become Mittel Europa.
What I object to is the refusal of many immigrants to integrate. If they come to Britain presumably they are attracted to our way of life. So why do they try so hard to change it?
That is not true of all immigrants. The Royal Regiment of Scotland is kept up to strength by blacks. In my own regiment they prove themselves again and again. In Afghanistan they were called out to rescue the SAS.
Twenty SAS men and 30 Afghan troops on a special mission had become pinned down after their Chinook was crippled by a fault. Alpha Company of the 3rd Battalion Royal Regiment of Scotland (Black Watch) drove back the Taliban, who swarmed from surrounding mountains to attack the out-numbered SAS.
Former head of the Army General Sir Mike Jackson stressed last night that five of the soldiers from Alpha Company's No 1 Platoon were black - showing BNP racists who have tried to hijack Britain's military heritage are out of touch. - M.O.D despatch.
A Welsh extremist website once honoured me with the title of Traitor of the Week. I shared it rather puzzlingly with Ryan Griggs, S4C, Radio Cymru, the Welsh Language Society, the Welsh Language Board and a very nice man called Jonesy who was a Radio Cymru presenter.
I am not a nationalist. Nationalism is a road which ends at the gates
of Auschwitz and we have had a lot of trouble with it in our family.You may recall my Auntie Jeannie was the widow of Uncle Tommy, a Scottish
Nationalist so incandescent that ten years after his death she was still afraid to visit England.
Her son-in-law Jackie, who looked after the boats of the Emir of Kuwait, invited Auntie Jeannie to visit.
"It's no in England, is it?" she inquired fearfully.
In the event, she had a great time, including supper with the Emir in his palace. She was not impressed.
"Does he aye get his dinner on tin plates?" she asked Jackie.
"They're no tin," whispered Jackie, "they're real gold."
"Maks nae difference," said my Auntie Jeannie. "Puir man,
ye cannae keep food hot on tin plates."
The day she got home she went to an Edinburgh market and bought the Emir a six-piece china dinner service.
Alas, we have lost the charming letter of thanks the Emir sent.
My Auntie Jeannie was the Great Imperturbable.
The nearest thing we had in our family to a tradition was the
Hogmanay Fight. My father emigrated to Manchester but
always returned home to Edinburgh on 30 December. He went a day
early to get in training for the whisky drinking marathon which was the family New Year.
By tea time on Old Year's Night whisky had washed away any
seasonal goodwill. By 9 pm naked hostility had replaced it, my
father invariably igniting it by taking out a provocative cigar.
"Bloody Englishman," growled Uncle Tommy, socialist
principles enflamed at the sight of such a capitalist
accessory.
"That makes bliddy two of us," my father would reply every
year.
Uncle Tommy's darkest secret was that he, the
most passionately Scottish of the family, had been born
during a brief visit by his mother to Lancashire.
Blows were exchanged. Three step-brothers, Jimmy and Matty
and Alec who tried to join the row, were rebuffed by Uncle
Tommy on the grounds they weren't family. This made Jimmy and Matty and Alec madder than anyone.
Whilst five brothers fought in the middle of the room, the
wives moved their chairs to the wall and continued their
conversation.Auntie Jeannie served tea.
At 11.45 pm she would say, "Tommy, have you seen the time?"
The fight ended at once and quarter of an hour later the
brothers had their arms round each other and were singing
Auld Lang Syne.
They don't make Hogmanays like that anymore. Or Auntie
Jeannies.
Saturday, 17 March 2012
A LOAD OF BULL
I have reviewed books, theatres and restaurants, and a very glamorous life it has been. Baskets of free books, no bills for a mountain of meals that Red Rum couldn’t jump over and no charge for the best seats at ballets, operas, musicals and plays.
My new task, reviewing colostomy bags, is something of a come down. As a subject shit does not call for lyrical prose. Even writing the word is an effort. I owe my pension to the royalties of Winnie the Pooh but I still think that generous bear is ill named.
Why does that inoffensive word summon up feelings of such distaste? Google it and it must be the only subject which does not return a single response. As a pictogram it is a pleasing arrangement of curves, vertical and horizontal brush strokes. By any other name - manure night soil, meadow muffins, compost - it is pleasantly rural.
It is nothing more than the detritus of good food and drink which as fertiliser will provide our future feasts. Indeed it is the stuff of life. Yet in the dictionary this unhappy word is given a terrible name.
The best poetry anthology is a dictionary. Dr Johnson illuminated entries in his delightful work by providing a verse or piece of prose, usually from his own well stocked mind, to illustrate his definition.
“Shittlecock”, he insists, is a real noun. It describes the game we know under a slightly different name. He provides this explanation: “It is called cock because of its feathers. Perhaps it is properly shuttle cork, a cork driven to and fro, as the instrument in weaving, and softened by frequent and rapid utterance from cork to cock.”
He offers this quotation from Collier:
“You need not discharge a cannon to break the chain of his thought, the pat of a shittlecock or the creaking of a jack, will do his business.”
Lesser dictionaries are less inventive, if more scathing
“Something disgusting, of poor quality or otherwise totally unacceptable. It’s a narcotic, foolish deceitful language, insolent talk; small or worthless; to treat with anger or disrespect. It’s an expression of anger, surprise or an expression of displeasure...”
Yet the same innocent letters are part of history. They are all of them ‘this’ and part of ‘that’, the larger part of ‘thirst’, and we could not wear a ‘shirt’ without them.
Worries about words launched Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott’s first best seller.
His friend William Clerk drew Scott's attention to racial tensions in post-Norman Conquest England. Clerk noted how our names for livestock generally have Anglo-Saxon origins (e.g. sheep, pig, cow) which are exchanged for Anglo-French terms once they are prepared for the table (e.g. mutton, pork, beef). This illustration of the subservience of labouring Saxon to land-owning Norman was subsequently inserted in Ivanhoe and became the novel’s theme.
“...........swine is good Saxon," said the Jester; "but how call you the sow
when she is flayed, and drawn, and quartered, and hung up by the heels,
like a traitor?"
"Pork," answered the swine-herd.
"I am very glad every fool knows that too," said Wamba, "and pork, I
think, is good Norman-French; and so when the brute lives, and is in
the charge of a Saxon slave, she goes by her Saxon name; but becomes a
Norman, and is called pork, when she is carried to the Castle-hall to
feast among the nobles; what dost thou think of this, friend Gurtha?"
"It is but too true doctrine, friend Wamba, however it got into thy
fool's pate."
"Nay, I can tell you more," said Wamba, in the same tone; "there is old
Alderman Ox continues to hold his Saxon epithet, while he is under the
charge of serfs and bondsmen such as thou, but becomes Beef, a fiery
French gallant, when he arrives before the worshipful jaws that are
destined to consume him. Mynheer Calf, too, becomes Monsieur de Veau
in the like manner; he is Saxon when he requires tendance, and takes a
Norman name when he becomes matter of enjoyment."
We handle words so carelessly and yet they are more dangerous than nuclear fission. I think a British market town is the ultimate civilised community yet when the Queen wishes to confer great honour she allows a town to call itself a city. No big deal, according to Cobbett to whom London was the Great Wen (a skin eruption). Historically a city is any town which contains a cathedral. There are 21 cathedral cities in Britain but only one cathedral town - St Asaph. I have never met anyone in that town who doesn’t insist it too is a city. So why the jubilation, when, to mark Her Diamond Jubilee, Our Gracious waves her wand and a city it becomes? As the French say, more musically, Merde!
.
IT’S BEING SO CHEERFUL...........
Doomsday theorists are alarmed that the Mayan ‘Long Count’ Calendar, as it is known, appears to end abruptly on a date they recorded as 13.0.0.0. On the Gregorian calendar, which we use today, this corresponds to December 21, 2012.
The only clue as to what the Mayans thought might happen on that day comes from an ancient stone tablet, discovered during road works in Mexico back in the Sixties. Carved upon it are hieroglyphics that refer to the year 2012 and an event that will involve Bolon Yokte, the Mayan god of war and creation.
Weathering and a crack in the stone have made the last part of the inscription illegible, but Mexican archaeologists have interpreted it as saying: ‘He will descend from the sky.’
There is no mention of reindeer but I still don’t like the notion of a sky crowded with a Mayan God, the Norse God Thor driving his wild herd and drunken old Santa, afire with seven million glasses of sherry, in charge of six rebellious reindeer with red noses that also hint at sherry servings.
PS: TRY MY COMIC NOVEL ISLAND FLING
.http://www.bewritebooks.com/mb/IslandFling/IslandFling.html#/1/
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