GOODBYES AREN'T EASY

When you are very old only your dimensions travel. I have grown shorter, my mouth has shrunk and in consequence my dentures wobble.

The compensation is that the the body only does Ageing on the Spot. The furthest I travel is to the garden to feed my Koi.

Sadly that will mean I will never return to my favourite cities. I won't miss Paris which is a vastly over-rated collection of the worst traits of the French. Nor Venice, a raddled old Queen of the Adriatic where everyone suffers terminal catarrh. But I will miss Vienna. I think if I lived in Vienna I would be smiling all the time. It must be the loveliest and least aggressive city in Europe with the most helpful population. Its joys are many.

Ringstrasse, a circular boulevard of palaces and galleries, ends at Schonbrunn where can be seen the gowns and toiletries of Empress Elizabeth, the Princess Diana of her 19th century day, whose beauty and twelve inch waist were the toast of Europe.

Grinzing, a wine-making village that links Vienna with its woods. Within half an hour of leaving the palace, we were toasting Elizabeth in Heuriger, the new “green” wine, which costs 60 pence per half pint, is recommended for diabetics and tastes deliciously like a frosty October morning.

We tried four Heurigen, the taverns where the wine is sold, and finally dined at the best, Martin Sepp’s. Bettina, our waitress, still smiling at the end of a busy evening, advised us that my order, a Heurigenplatte of assorted warm specialities including smoked pork, dumplings and sauerkraut, was sufficient for two, warned us that the local Cabinet Sauvignon pudding wine was expensive at £2 a glass and suggested we finish the meal with an ambrosial schnapps, a local speciality distilled from the must of the grape.

Mayerling, the hunting lodge where Crown Prince Rudolf enjoyed venison and champagne, whilst Bratfisch, the fiacre driver he hired by the year, sang and whistled Austrian folk tunes. The same night the Crown Prince murdered his teenage girlfriend, Maria Vetsera, before committing suicide. A Viennese aristocrat told us what he claimed was the real story. Vetsera could not persuade Rudolph to divorce and marry her so whilst he slept drunkenly she castrated him. Understandably when he awoke he murdered her.

In what must be the ultimate spin doctoring, Franz Joseph demolished the room in which the couple died, replacing it with a Carmelite chapel. When the bodies were discovered, two uncles of the girl lifted her corpse to a carriage, propped it between them, with a broomstick keeping it erect, so that passers by would think she was still alive and drove to a burial chapel at the Heiligenkreuz Monastery, a superb medieval building which was the next stop on our macabre tour.

I doubt if it is possible to find a bad meal in Vienna. We ate splendidly in the grandeur of the Rathaus, after a visit to the superlative National Art Gallery; magnificently in the scarlet damask dining room of Hotel Sacher, rightly billed as one of the world’s great restaurants; stylishly at Noodles, a chic Italian restaurant next door to the Musikverein, where, in the Golden Hall, a New Year Concert is televised round the world; and where we heard a Mozart concert by musicians in 18th century costume.

But the taste that lingers was a delicious Berne sausage, coated in egg, which the night porter cooked for me over a portable stove in our hotel, the Deutschmeister.

We saw the vivacious statues to Strauss and to Mozart, the inn where Schubert wrote The Linden Tree, the house where Beethoven composed his Ninth and Pastoral symphonies and the dance hall where the Strauss waltzes were first heard. We drank delicious punch at a rustic booth to raise funds for St Stephen’s Cathedral, we took coffee and Torte in fashionable cafes and wondered how Viennese women can eat so much cake and stay so slim.

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Mostly I will miss Bruges.

What bacon is to the butty, Mandelson to mortgages, Bruges is to the beer house.

If you gave up sleep you could probably do a comprehensive pub crawl of the city in just over year.

The oldest pub, the 16th century Vlissinghe on Blekersstraat, has a lovely garden, though people who went on opening night 500 years ago are probably still waiting to be served. L’estaminet, Park 5, has delicious food and great jazz. The tiny, elegant De Garre, off Breidelstraat, serves beer specially brewed for it with generous saucers of cheese. Then there is ”t’Brugs Beertje” across the Kemelstraat from the Hobbit Bistro. The “Little Bear“ has furniture you would be stuck with at a boot sale. The walls are a delicate shade of nicotine, though rarely visible for brewery adverts, the seats are hard, the floors innocent of carpet. And I have got it backed as the top beer house of the Western world. It serves 300 brands of beer, including a special ale brewed for Christmas. With 295 of them I have no quarrel but there are five others you have to drink in the company of adults and even then you would fail a breath test for walking upright.

The Fearsome Five are brewed by Trappist monks who live in perpetual silence. They will tell you it is a vow. Rubbish. Prolonged exposure to their beer has robbed them of the power of speech. Two sips and you arrive at that state where conversation is easy but pronunciation difficult. It is like being mugged with a velvet cosh. Your mind walks in ever diminishing circles, whimpering uneasily.

What can I tell you? When I was last there, the amiable landlord Jan de Bruyne and his wife Daisy ran a Beer Academy in the back room where they shared their vast knowledge of beer and quantities of their stock with the customers. I think I attended it. I even have a certificate to prove it. But there is no name on it, nor is it signed. I do not know what “heeft deelgenomen aan een Seminarie Belgisch Bier“ means and I cannot remember a thing I was taught.

If they had sprayed Afghanistan with Trappist beer the Taliban could have been taken by the Vienna Boys Choir. If you spilt any in the garden you would face green fly the size of horses and butterflies with bomb bays under their wings. Here is ale would make a cat speak.

Alas, I missed the pub with 160 chamber pots but I'd like to stay in Marian Degraeve’s Kazernevest guest house which offers “clean hot shower and musical toilet”.

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PRAISE to the Duke of Edinburgh who neatly sidestepped when the IRA Head Butcher attempted to speak to him.

BLAME to Paxman for bullying the youngest MP Cloe Smith, an inexperienced broadcaster. Paxman is in the wrong programme. He belongs in the tabloid fringe of the entertainment business with bear baiting, dog and cock fighting and public hanging. An excellent quiz master he is out of his depth in a serious news magazine. A raised eyebrow is no match for intelligent questioning and it is time that his colleagues on the programme taught him the art in which they excel.

Or he might with profit be sent to fag for Martha Carney, John Ley or Libby Purves. Even that dreadful Dame on Woman's Hour could teach him how to elicit information. He made his name by asking the same question of Michael Howard fourteen times. Only later did we discover that he was covering up for a production fault.

He tried it again on William Hague, asking him over and over again if he was certain the Tory deputy chairman Lord Ashcroft was resident in Britain for tax purposes. Hague repeated the same slightly evasive answer without a hint of a squirm. Like many short men he constantly strives without success to achieve the same height as his opinion of himself. He is a tissue paper bully, easily defeated. Angela Eagle, a Labour politician behaved as if he wasn’t there, refusing to be deterred from the speech she wanted to give. Visibly shocked, Paxman backed off. A senior economist from Plaid Cymru made ­Paxman read out a statistic from one of his own briefing documents to prove that the charge he was making was statistically false. Respect MP George Galloway discomfited him when he told him: “Don't try your tricks on me”,

TALE PIECE

”The Northwich Guardian headlined “Mystery of headless monkey found in street” . The paper has now published a story online saying the RPSCA investigation had revealed the “monkey” was actually a squirrel .

     

     HAPPY FAMILIES

Italy has its Mafia. In Wales it is the TAFIA. Both countries are ruled not by government but by families. In my day both HTV and the BBC were run by three generations of the same family, The shadow Welsh Secretary is the son of the Chairman of the Welsh Arts Council. The daughter of An earlier Arts Council Godfather married the Secretary of State for Wales . In Cardiff as in Naples keeping it in the family has a special dimension.

IT'S A BLUNDERFUL WORLD

Comfy as old slippers, I survey a world bathed in rosy content and it’s all down to Clausewitch and a clown.

How cheered I was to hear that Jimmy Carr, puzzlingly described as a comedian, is going to pay tax on his wages, just like Our Gracious and the rest of us. Bit harder for him because he was only paying a penny in the pound on three million of the little crinklies.

He might even have persuaded some of his fellow celebrities to do the same. Take That are alleged to have put £26 million into a similar scheme. 

But what of jolly old Karl von C? He tipped us a very broad wink. “War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means.”

Always listen to an expert and General Karl comes from a race devoted to wars. Sadly they have no talent for winning them. The Hun tried twice to conquer the world by force and failed. Now he seeks to conquer by manipulating currency with much more success.

My five closest friends were all army colonels and every one of them an eager warrior. I have always believed servicemen to be the salt of the earth. Unfortunately I loathe war and have never understood why such noble men could be persuaded to wear unbecoming clothes and kill perfect strangers. Especially since the moment the war ends they meet in mutual admiration. Now I know that war, the ultimate inefficiency, is a branch of politics all is clear.

I had forgotten Versailles where most of our troubles started. Those pale imitations of statesmen burdened Germany with reparations she   could not hope to pay. Weimar collapsed in an avalanche of worthless currency, the Nazis leapt into the vacuum with promises of jobs and prosperity and the seed was set for another war.

Germany now insists that Greece is burdened with debt it cannot hope to pay and at the time of writing showed no sign of divvying up. Golden Dawn, the new Nazi party, has won its first seats in the Greek parliament,

Another thing that puzzles me about soldiers is that never tumble to what sewers politicians are.

No matter whom they meet, Jap, Hun, Taliban or Chinese, they are never going to come across an enemy as implacable as the Ministry of Defence.

No government has ever treated returning warriors with anything more welcoming than a place in a dole queue. Yet it is the first to tap them on the shoulder whilst they are still fighting off an enemy.

Not only has the MoD given notice to quit to the hapless boys it bundled off to Afghanistan. It has announced redundancies for soldiers within days of them becoming eligible for a handsome pension. The Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders has been rewarded for spilling its blood for two hundred years with oblivion.

The MoD is clearly ashamed of its job. There is obviously something distasteful about being involved with warriors. Since they virtually won world war two for us, however distasteful the destruction they wrought on enemy civilians, the refusal for half a century to grant Bomber Command a memorial was a disgrace. Shameful that veterans had to raise £700,000 themselves to build one. Worse was to come. Next week the memorial will be unveiled in the presence of the Royal Family at a cost equal to the building bill. The veterans will have to raise that money too. The MoD has refused to give them a penny.

Short of money, the Ministry of Defecation explains.

Short of money? It is spending 5 billion pounds replacing Harrier jets which cannot land on aircraft carriers after giving away the fleet of Harriers which could. Another billion is going to refit Rolls Royce so the MoD can spend another twenty billion building nuclear submarines which they specify must be able to destroy Moscow. Moscow? Russia, though it has won a few, has never in recent history started a war.

Short of money?

This week saw the opening of the Cultural Olympic Games at a cost of 55 million though it consists largely of events like the Proms which were happening anyway and things that should never have happened at all.

The government is stumping up half a million to smarten up shops near the Olympic Park.

 If the doctors’ strike succeeds the taxpayer will be required to find sixty-six billion towards their excessive pensions.

The Met has spent almost £8m over the past year on 150 staff investigating allegations of wrongdoing involving journalists.

Operation Weeting – the Met’s second investigation into phone-hacking – will rack up £5.9m in costs from January 2011 to the end of 2012, using 83 officers and 19 administrative staff.

Operation Elveden, the probe into illegal payments to police and public officials, has so far cost £1.5m and employed 36 officers and nine staff. A further £0.4m was spent on Operation Tuleta, the inquiry into computer hacking, involving seven officers and one administrator.

Mark Colman, an ex-Royal Engineer is to stay submerged in a water tank for 120 hours to raise £500,000 for the Forces’ Charity ‘Veterans in Action’.  Peter Foster, Bishop of Chester, the heir to claims of walking on water, is himself claiming £27,000 in attendance fees and £ 7,309 expenses for attending the House of Lords.

OLYMPIC SHAMES

The millions have been spent, the committees convened, the barns stormed, large number of bank notes have been trousered. Now is the time for unveiling…

The secret is out. Old Lord Coe and his fiddlers three (actually many more) are overjoyed. Forget Peking or Beijing or whatever name it is known by this week. Eat your fickle toreadors’ hearts out, Spain. We’ve got an Opening Ceremony, a feat of imagination to rival Goebel’s notion of the Olympic torch; an idea he probably got watching those book burnings which were such a heartening aspect of life under the Nazis.

We are going to have a toy farmyard - complete with model cows and dear little milkmaids. Not, I suppose, dwarfed with giant wind turbines but certainly with real clouds cunningly contrived to shower the spectators with real rain. Though don’t forget to provide free umbrellas to those Olympian bribe takers who decide which country will be burdened with debt. Go nicely with the private roads, the chauffeurs with peaked caps and the free hotels that helped them to come to an impartial decision.

There used to be a state of mind amongst editors cynically known as “Closing Time Genius” which described the unworkable ideas they staggered back with from lunch.

Lord Coe and his courtiers must have had an Olympian lunch.

When I was little my mother, and her mother before her, never missed the Ideal Home Exhibition which came to Manchester every year.

It had show houses and gadgets for putting the hard work into household chores. My grannie bought them by the bushel. When she died we found them, still in their original wrappings, in carrier bags stacked in the glory hole (the cupboard under the stairs). My mother pounced on them with glee to add to her own considerable collection. When she died I found them nestling coyly in the same carrier bags with her own collection of Kleene Eazies: combined potato peeler and cork screw, tiny looms for mending socks, scone moulds shaped into aces - spades, hearts, diamonds and clubs. Ideal for bridge parties but not much use for my old mum who got confused playing Happy Families.

The exhibition always had a centre piece - of guess what?

A model farm with wooden animals and sound effects of cows mooing (make a note, Lord Coe, my grannie was entranced, though my old mum was scared of cows).

But hold your foot up, Your Lordship. Why not go the whole hog and have the athletes coming out two by two behind their countries’ flags, from a giant plastic Ark. With ubiquitous Boris as an intoxicated Noah? Come think of it, his Mrs Noahs could come out two by two: they seem to be in plentiful supply.

The permutations are endless. Get rid of the runners and the riders, the jumpers and the boxers.

How about a Pentathlon of Snakes and Ladders, Ludo and long distance Tiddly Winks? Musical chairs is always fun, perhaps with Stuart Hall playing the piano in jovial mood.

At the Ideal Home Exhibition they always had a gypsy orchestra, usually Romanies from romantic Rochdale, who played in a restaurant puzzlingly decked out as a Parisian boulevard café, where you could get tripe by the yard from United Cattle Products. Which always inspired my grannie to warn me: “If U.C.P on tripe, don’t eat it”, to the chagrin of my mother who lived in dread of being shown up.

Don’t have tickets. Give every visitor a sheaf of forms to fill in like real farmers are burdened with. The Bribe Takers will require an upholstered office suite staffed with glamorous secretaries to fill in their forms.

A closing ceremony? Nothing easier. A presentation to the bribe takers of bills for accommodation, meals, private roads, chauffer driven cars.

In that way you will be the first country to end the Games with a small profit.

THAT WHICH HITS THE FANMAIL

I read that part of the Games opening ceremony will be a 'mosh pit' and I was baffled, then discovered it was a free-for-all frenzy. On the streets, it would be a riot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQW8eb1P3dk

Ken Ashton

Last time I saw anything like that was in “Zulu”.

Sky News:

Tourism is expected to slump during the Olympics and not just in London - as high prices keep visitors away.

The 2012 Games were predicted to be a big money-spinner attracting hordes of holidaymakers to the UK, but bookings for many attractions, hotels and tours are down around 33% and show no sign of picking up.

Simon Jenkins;

Given this week's PR coup, I wonder if Boyle might have others up his sleeve. He might convert the rest of the £27m into £10 notes and set fire to the lot in a metaphor for the modern Olympics in the middle of the stadium, to a thunderous backdrop of Underworld drum'n'bass. Or a Frankenstein monster might rise from its bed, take an almighty shot of Trainspotting smack and close the evening mimicking Prospero, declaring everyone mere spirits. "The baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capp'd towers, the glorious palaces … shall dissolve, and like the insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind." Now that would be a show.

The Guardian

NOTE TO BRIBE TAKERS: This column has been constructed without the use of the Olympic Logo which you have used instead of highwaymen’s pistols to extort even more money from shop keepers.

THE COLD WAR WASN’T EVEN A SHIVER

It was invented by Harry Truman, against considerable opposition the worst US President, and burnished by Winston Churchill in his famous Iron Curtain speech, fancying himself a latter day Pericles. They both had form. Truman dropped the atom bomb AFTER the Japanese had begged to surrender unconditionally, solely to frighten the Russians, and Churchill ordered his Chiefs of Staff in 1945 to prepare a plan for the invasion of Russia.

Sir Michael Howard, by a mile the best military historian, said on the collapse of the Soviet Union:

“No serious historian argues that Stalin ever had any intention of moving his forces outside the area he occupied in Eastern Europe.”

It was fantasy like Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, ready for launch in forty five minutes; like the domino theory that insisted that if the North won in Vietnam, the whole of South East Asia would go communist. The unwinnable war in Afghanistan was said to be revenge for 9/11. In fact an attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan was already being planned in Washington to settle old scores with al Qaeda.

You can read the whole sorry story, deeply sourced, in Andrew Alexander’s seminal “America and the Imperialism of Ignorance”.

So I am as little concerned by Mrs Clinton’s warning that the cold war is starting up again as I was by the many lies of her priapic husband.

ARBORNEAL ? BORN TO BE TREE

           Broadly speaking I am in favour of sex education.

When I was a lad I was told I had grown on a blackcurrant bush. Not very nice going through life thinking you were adopted and your real mother was a shrub.

No whittling wood for me on the doorsteps of my childhood. I might

have been cutting up a cousin. As autumn approached each year I waited in dread for my hair to turn gold and fall at my feet. In the gardens of my youth pruning time was an agony.

In the same way no one has been able to convince me there are no fairies, so I have never been able to shed - if you will forgive the arboreal expression - a feeling that I am part twig, though I rejected with vigour allegations that I was a chip off the old block.

When I got older I was introduced to the more conventional forms of procreation but to be frank with you I think there is more gravitas in the blackcurrant method.

No one warned me that in real life the position was absurd and the method improbable. And it did not always work, though in all honesty it worked more often than blackberrying, an activity which had very sinister connotations in my childhood.

I was always surprised when two people went out to pick soft fruit, three did not come back. My own efforts to provide myself with a brother were a gloomy failure. I would select this fine bouncing bud and place it in a matchbox lined with cotton wool. But alas, nothing came of it.

As to other functions I will only say the blackcurrant bush has much to commend it. No mouth, therefore no toothache. Eats through the feet and the leaves. None of those tiring strolls to work up an appetite for lunch.

Some of us, I regret, are built even more oddly than most. I was literally an all round reporter. I was as broad as I was long. The last TV series I made was a source of great embarrassment. Not to beat about the bush - and how that phrase strikes at the heart- where other people go in at the waist, I went out for quite a distance. People doubted the reality of my body.

On radio you get used to the size phenomenon. The way listeners invariably tell you in a disappointed tone: ‘You are much taller on the radio.’  But what was I to do about the lady who came up, patted me familiarly on the belt buckle and asked:  ‘Is that real or are you just wearing it on tele?’

I loved broadcasting. I felt at home the moment I sat behind a microphone. Nervous until the microphone went live, then a feeling of peace. Wynford Vaughan Thomas (oh, that he had commentated on the Jubilee) explained it wasn’t really nerves, it was adrenalin. The spirit telling the body to do well.

Broadcasting is writing with an extra dimension. Punctuation is replaced by a change of tone or a brief pause. You can add emphasis, even emotion. I experimented with broadcasting columns in a series I called Radio Brynsiencyn, rather than writing them in various newspapers, and it worked.

I was never part of the BBC. For thirty years I worked on weekly contracts, which meant I began every week unemployed. It didn’t matter. In those days working for BBC Wales was like joining a new family. Alas, the BBC changed and my happy family life ended in a spectacular bust up.

For all that I still feel proprietorial about my favourite Auntie and it hurts when she makes a mess of things. So this week has been a bummer.

As always the camera crew filming the jubilee were faultless. They knew where to look and where to linger. They lingered on the shots of those brave girls, soaked to the skin, singing their hearts out in pouring rain on an open deck. Even the Royal Family applauded. Sadly not one of the brash young commentators even mentioned it though it summed up the whole damp day. One critic said of the commentators: ‘It was like an endless One Show.’ Can anything be more damning?

I am in an email loop of newspaper men and they were appalled. Said one, the highly respected former editor of two national newspapers: ‘I yearned for the days when experienced, highly professional journalists worked for the BBC.

‘Describing the gold leaf on the bows of the Royal boat, a BBC idiot said:”All that gold leaf on the stern on the boat must have taken some doing.”

‘Talk about not knowing his arse from his elbow. Had he bothered to do his homework, he would have known that the gold leaf he was describing adorned the bows of the boat. He would have been able to tell his audience that the work had been patiently carried out by a father and son team who, from their workshop in Greenwich, had also worked on gilding the name letters of the Cutty Sark. Further, he would have also known that the gilding on the Royal boat took each of them 47 man hours. And if I knew all that, why didn't he?’

A former managing editor of the Mirror Group counselled:

‘You really can't blame the poor bloody interviewers.

Are you having a great day? -- Er, yes.

What was the best bit for you? -- Er...

Did you see the queen? -- Yes, good.

How was that? -- Er... great

Did you see the fly-past? -- Yeah.

Was it good? -- Yeah, good.

What do you think of the queen? -- Er, nice lady.

And the duke... I suppose you're hoping he has a speedy recovery? -- Er... yes.

You can blame the bloody editors and producers who are running this meaningless, time-filling crap all day (and night), over four or more days.

Difficult to imagine that TV can actually ruin a spectacular occasion. But it does.

I appreciate that it can't be easy to think of something new to say every half hour, all day.

But this, this morning, on Sky News:

"Tell me about this ship. It is unique, isn't it?"

"Yes indeed. Absolutely. In fact it is one of only two in the world."

When I did Vox Pops for the Beeb two researchers preceded me looking for people with interesting stories.

The only newspaperman who spoke in favour of the coverage lives in America. A former Head Honcho on the National Enquirer, he wrote:

‘Remember one thing: in our heyday, we all were trying to please the vast majority of our intended audience. If during my stint at the Enquirer, I had worried about the opinions of other journalists, current or past, I would have been out of a job in no time. The real question is: did the audience (grannies, mummies, postal workers and dustmen et al) hate the commentaries as much as you? If they were happy and too dumb to notice the difference between now and yesteryears it just puts an emphasis on the old adage (which I don’t totally buy): you’ll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of your audience.’

                                                          

Turbulent Priests

For thirty years I earned a living by renting out the mouth for money. As a result the mouth was a great traveller. I scarcely left my armchair but ever week the mouth went all over the world.

Frankly I am glad of the practice because any day now I am going to be standing knee-deep in clouds and deafened by the incessant harp plucking, shouting over the noise, explaining to God I never had any problem with Him. The evidence of His existence is so obvious it would be foolish to deny it. Such a complex thing as life could not possibly be an accident.  It was religion I had come to think of as evil and, frankly, if any of its various versions of God came to live next door, I would move.

Oddly, some of my best friends have been priests; indeed one of them is an archbishop. Though Barry Morgan was still in the ranks, a rural dean, when we met, and chiefly famous for the wonderful creamy gateaux he used to make to relieve stress and share with friends at jolly parties.

He was Bishop of Bangor when I was invited to chair a discussion at the Hay Festival on the Disestablishment of the Church with top theologians including Rowan Williams.

I went to Barry for advice and admitted I knew little about the subject.

‘Never stopped you in the past,’ he said.

‘Do me a favour,’  I said. ‘Your mate Rowan Williams is one of the debaters and he’s got a brain bigger than your cathedral.’

‘You tell him, if he isn’t kind to you,”he said” the next Synod it’s croziers at dawn.’

As I got to know him better I was awestruck by the simple faith which was at the golden centre of his being. When I got the Big C and you couldn’t put the odds on paper for survival, I am not ashamed to admit I rang him to ask him to put in a word at Head Office.

As bishop, he took a very relaxed view of one of his priests, Geraint ap Iorwerth, who opened his own branch of religion in his church at Pennal on the Welsh coast. He founded the Order of Sancta Sophia (Holy Wisdom), dedicated to the Wisdom of God, the feminine side of the Godhead.

Over the lychgate of his church he carved ‘My house will be a house of prayer for all nations’. Inside the church was a sanctuary. Under an icon of the Holy Wisdom from the Byzantine Church, there were paperback translations of the Buddhist Dhammapada, the Hindi Upanishads and the Koran. There was an Ashram, or meeting place, in a converted barn and in the graveyard a Celtic cross and a picnic table that doubled as an altar. Nearby was a barbecue and a bonfire site where fires were lit, as they would have been in pre-Christian days, to celebrate Midsummer (the feast of St John the Baptist) or Celtic New Year (All Hallows’  Eve).

He told me: ‘I don’t think there is one true faith. The cosmic Christ is beyond all religions, including Christianity. He came to teach humility and we are arrogant if we say there is no true love in other religions. How can we have an exclusive line to the Mind of God? Every religion gives you a different perspective of the Truth. God must be daft if He left it all for the Christians.

‘I don’t advocate a mishmash. It’s not realistic to say you can bring religions together. But you can create an atmosphere where you can share prayer and join in the search for the truth.’

I was glad when he offered to say a word at Tumour Time. God will remember what a busy week that was. Another very close friend, a Roman Catholic priest, Brian Jones, said a mass for me. He was a lovable rascal in many ways, gourmet and lover of good wine, with an eye for a pretty girl. A gifted raconteur and always in trouble with his bishops. One year for his Christmas mass he invited the children to bring their toys. He was delighted when one small boy in a cowboy suit marched down the aisle, drew his toy revolver and shot up the Grotto.

When the Pope came to Wales Father Brian took his flock to meet him. He couldn’t resist hanging on to the Papal umbrella he was loaned. His Bishop spotted him leaving the ground with it.

‘Brian, Brian, what are you thinking of?’ he reproached him. ‘Take five, they’ll think you are collecting them.’

When from time to time he was disciplined and moved to a new parish as a punishment, his parishioners were bereft and always threw a magnificent farewell party. They knew at the sick bed or when anyone was dying he was the man to have at your side.

He had a great faith in his God. Once when my car wouldn’t start in Menai Bridge as he was passing he muttered a few words over the bonnet and it started at once.

Looking back, they all shared a deep belief in God but a very relaxed view of Princes of the Church.

Oddly enough, it was a priest who prompted my rejection of religion. By a mile the holiest man I have ever met, he was a Sri Lankan and his name was Father Tissus Belasuniya. I interviewed him when he was excommunicated because of a book he wrote “Mary and Human Liberty”. He argued that Mary and Joseph were political exiles and Christ was a revolutionary. The pope of the day took particular exception to his belief that Christ could be debated, just like any other leader. What really sent the cardinals a-flutter was the way his book reinforced the words of Luke: ‘He hath put down the mighty from their seats and exalted them of low degree.’

I much preferred his views to the insistence of the nuns at my wife’s convent that whistling and sitting with her legs crossed made Our Lady blush. And I have to point out that there is no record of pederastic priests being ex-communicated. And I do wonder why so many fine young men have lost their lives partly because of the plight of women in Afghanistan. I have an increasing dread that we are about to lose more of our golden youth in Syria as politicians take us into another war we cannot win to pursue the fiction that we are still running the world. The Anglicans don’t want to allow women to become bishops and the Catholics won’t allow them to marry priests or hold any religious office.

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If I ordered a pint in a pub and when the landlord pulled the pump nothing happened he would return my money. I made a contract with Anglian Water that in return for a handsome sum they would satisfy my water needs. If I cannot get all the water I want because they’ve lost so much through their inefficient delivery pipes, ought they not give me my money back?

CHOCKS AWAY

They have all gone now but I was lucky enough to meet two pilots who fought in fragile aircraft above the battlefields in World War One. Sir Tom Armstrong was a gentle man in every sense of the word. A musicologist, he was the chief adjudicator at the International Eisteddfod in Llangollen. He was an erudite man, not only in music but in literature; the father of Lord Armstrong, Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet Secretary famed for coining the phrase “economical with the truth” at the Australian Spy Trial. Except that he didn’t. It was coined by an 18^th century politician, Edmund Burke.

Sir Thomas hated the war. When I met him in 1979 he was still haunted by the occasion he dropped a bomb over the side of his aircraft. “I remember it every day,” he confessed. “All the people I must have killed.”

Wing Commander Gwillym H. Lewis DFC loved the war. At 18 and barely out of school he was a pilot with 32 Squadron RFC. He shot down twelve German fighters, won his DFC and was officially declared an Ace before his 19^th birthday..

He was 97 when we met and still enjoying a distinguished career in the City. He had just published “Wings over the Somme”, largely made up of the letters he wrote home from France. It describes that hazardous time when pilots expected to be killed within a month of joining their squadron. I know of no better account. Within eight weeks of joining, nine of his flight of twelve men had been shot down. He was responsible for two of the ten enemy planes they had downed. His letters show that he loved the war and loathed the “Hun”. He was so keen to join that he paid £100 for four hours’ flying training which included a near death experience when he got into a tail spin and dropped from 3,000 feet to twenty feet at 120 miles an hour (twice the normal flying speed which was 60 mph) in an aircraft in which the fuselage from wing to tail consisted of uncovered wooden struts.

He flew from the flying school to France to join his squadron, landing at Folkestone on the way for a jolly lunch at the Metropole. He was reprimanded after his first dogfight in which the Hun escaped for not getting close enough to down him. Within a year he was promoted to Flight Commander and at the end of the war had, uniquely, not lost a novice pilot, although he was in almost daily combat.

He wrote home: “The war is a jolly jape. Dogfights are great fun. Odds of 6 to 1. Nothing to worry about.”

He had no respect for the Hun who were afraid of the SDH2 his squadron flew. He wrote: “It has practically scared them off the Front. Occasionally they manage to steal over at 15,000 feet but even then they hesitate whether to dive on a DH if he happens to be below them.”

Baron von Richthofen was the best known of the German Aces but Lewis had no time for him: ”We are all quite bucked that Richthofen is under the soil. Shot down by a Camel while attacking an RE 8. Never admired him very much as he was such a boaster. I don’t think the Huns were very fond of him either.”

Neither was he too keen on the French.

“A more dirty crowd of people it is impossible to imagine... And the children wash only when they grow out of their clothes and have to take them off.”

I met a third ex-pilot. He was the son of a Wrexham carpenter who retired as an Air Vice-Marshal. He was Sir Frederick Rosier, who said modestly:  “When I had Fighter Command...” So he seemed the best man to ask what made an “Ace”.

“They have the gift of being able to see the whole sky at a glance,” he told me.

Great place for pilots, Wrexham.  Another local man, David Lord, won the VC for action dropping supplies from his DC3 at Arnhem.

READER KEN ASHTON writes...

I dreamt last night it was 2052 and village correspondent for the Bugle, Harry Hadenough, was at the Leveson inquiry being scrutinised by the non-prosecuting prosecutor.

'How did you come by the bowling results in the summer of 2012?'

'I think I found them on the bar at the Dog & Duck.'

'Did you buy the secretary a drink?'

'Yes - pint of the usual.'

'Was it usual to treat club officials to a drink?'

'Er, yes'.

'And is it true to say you gave a free copy of the local paper to PC Snodgrass, the village bobby?'

'Yes. I gave him one every week.'

'Was this in return for privileged police information?'

'Well, he did give me accident details and local crime stuff.'

'Would you concede that this is the murky side of local journalism? Corrupting a police officer, buying drinks for club officials?

'Er...'

AND

You've been invited to a few games of footie with your mates, staying at posh hotels, food and digs paid for. But because you've been a bit naughty, you can only sit and watch the first couple of games, though you can do a bit of jogging with the lads. And you get paid.

Most Sunday League footballers would snatch your hand off with a big grin, but apparently Wayne Rooney gets the blues and needs Gary Neville to nursemaid him.

It's a funny old world.

Litterature

I have been 83 for three days and everything that ever happened to me happened a long time ago. This struck me again as I mused on the bravery of tiny Alice Arnold who returned litter which a driver had thrown from his car window.

Many years ago the delightful Anne, Duchess of Westminster, warned me of the dangers of doing an Alice Arnold. She had been fishing in Sutherland and as she came off the water she noticed a car parked in a lay-by. To her disgust the occupants threw the detritus of their picnic into the grass verge.

As they drove off she retrieved it and ordered her gillie, "Follow that car", which she said was very pleasing and fulfilled a lifetime's ambition.

At length the offending car stopped. The Duchess, bearing the rubbish before her, marched up to the picnickers and pushed it through the driver's window.

"I believe this belongs to you," she said, at her most imperious.

Whereupon the driver, a Glaswegian, handed it back. "It’s OK, hen," he said, "we've finished wi' it," and drove off.

Anne, who owned Arkle, the wonder horse, was one of several widows of Ben D’or, the fabulously wealthy Duke who carried a pocketful of jewellery in case he met a woman who took his fancy.

Incensed at being stopped by a traffic policeman when being driven through Chester to catch a train, he had a station built on the outskirts of the city to ensure he would never be stopped again. Anne was one of several wives. When someone asked his mistress Coco Chanel why she didn’t marry him, she replied: ”Why should I? Everyone else does.”

At a Guildhall reception for the Davis Cup tennis team en route to Sweden he asked them if he could help in any way. He was told they had nowhere to train over there and they wondered if he knew anyone with a tennis court.

“Only the king,” he said. “Would he do?”

They said he would and His Grace offered to drop him a line.

On their return they met again at another reception.

“King any use?” he asked.

“Marvellous,” they told him. “He gave us the run of the Royal Courts and a splendid banquet. But might we ask you a question? How do you drop a line to a king?”

“Oh,” said the Duke, “nothing simpler. My chap just wrote on the envelope: “The King, Copenhagen.”

“But, Your Grace, Copenhagen is in Denmark. We were in Sweden.”

“No problem,” beamed the Duke. “All these kings know each other.”

  

Continuing the relentless name dropping... At his 100^th birthday party I asked Lord Langford what it was like, hitting a century.

He said: “You should know. You are in the overnight declaration as nearly my oldest friend. I expect you have found out that growing old is not for cissies.”

That it ain’t. The worst thing is the way time suddenly speeds up. The Spectator becomes a daily and it’s Christmas every other week. Or as Christopher Fry memorably said: “You seem to have breakfast every half hour.”

FOR YOUR COMFORT

The Government is promoting a service to teach mothers how to love their babies and establishing training courses for school children in handling bereavement grief and standing on one leg.........

What price talent? A dog gets £500,000 and a cellist gets £2,000. What? Crazy? -  Daily Mirror. Ashleigh Butler was awarded £500,000 on Britain's Got Talent for training her dog Pudsey to do a few crowd-pleasing tricks. Meanwhile over on BBC2, 15-year-old Laura van der Heijden, a teenage cellist prodigy, was awarded £2,000 after being named the BBC's Young Musician for 2012.

JACOB SPEAKS

 'Taid, why do you always save the hardest crossword clues