A RARE BIT

The Welsh were invented by an ancestor of mine, a Pictish

chieftain called Cunnedda. Nothing very grand about that.

He is only an ancestor by marriage and I share him with most North Walians because Wales is not so much a country as a family. If they took the trouble most Welsh people could claim similar nobility.

It is said of the Welsh that anyone who can take his

ancestry back to the sixteenth century can prove a personal

flow of princely blood, so avid were our national forebears in matters of descent.

In Anglesey I had three neighbours. One, my landlord the Marquess of Anglesey ,claimed King Lear as an ancestor; the vicar's wife laid claim to Adam's son Seth - a less modest woman would have claimed Adam; whilst Sir Kyffin Williams, the painter, carried the blood of every Welsh prince you could shake a stick at.

What is more, all of us could all show you family trees to prove it. My own begins triumphantly with a sister of the Virgin Mary. Had there been a Booker Prize for Fiction in the Middle Ages it would certainly have been won by the genealogists.

The sad truth is that these ancient links are not my blood

kin. I am a professional alien. I shuffle through life with

the yellow patch of the stateless trusty sewn on my soul's

tunic. My name is pure Viking and my first recorded blood ancestor was brought from Normandy by Edward the Confessor to build castles on the Welsh border. His name was Ralph the Knight. When it became fashionable among the Norman men about town to have surnames, more often than not associated with their properties, he chose the name of a field at Dewchurch (then in Wales and called Dewichurch). The field was called Skudmer. No linguist, he did not know it meant Shitty Bog. .

Since then, more or less equal portions of Scots, English and Welsh have gone into mixing the substantial soup which is me. The fairies at my christening wore tall Welsh hats, tartan shawls and Lancashire clogs. I can always feel this mixed ancestry jostling me. Pushing me into dimly remembered loyalties; making me sing words I do not know to tunes I only remember by the curling of my toes.

Wherever I go I am a stranger. It is the proper condition of a writer, of course, but the fact remains I can call no country home; no patron saint mine. Living in my body is like driving a vehicle with three quarrelsome passengers, each of whom wants a different programme on the radio.

I am not Welsh by accident of birth but by choice. I am a volunteer. I chose to be Welsh because I detected in the Welsh those human qualities which I believe are important. They are: a dizzy infatuation with life and with words; exuberance; an ability to be dazzlingly bright and desperately dull, sometimes within the same hour; wit and the generosity of a drunken sailor with eight arms, full pockets and only fifteen minutes left of his shore leave.

Add to that a strong, sometimes crippling, sense of family. a respect for scholarship; but above all an indefinable quality which I can only describe as a sense of warm embrace. Going to Wales fifty years ago was like slipping into a pair of old slippers after a long day wearing tight shoes.

I do not think it an accident that so many Italians settled in Wales which Rene Cutforth called the Mediterranean in the rain. I believe this happy, talented, tempestuous race settled here because they found total compatibility.

I suspect this description of the Welsh might come as a surprise to readers on the other side of Offa's Dyke. The caricature of the Welshman printed on many Saxon minds is of a narrow faced, foxy hypocrite, dressed in a suit made from the covers of old prayer books, leaping from cottage to cottage, flaming torch in hand. Or coming up from the netherworld in a cage after a pit disaster singing Cwm Rhondda.

Useless to explain that in Wales hypocrisy is an art form, lovingly practised, and you get points for it on a sliding scale.

But it is not practised by every Welshman. Nor is every Welshman steeped in the Old Testament and lechery.

Another art form, which I suspect has its roots in the tribal past, is the ability to hate. Not just the English who are casually cast as the old enemy. The truth is that when Edward I marched into North Wales looting and slaying, the Englishmen in his army were outnumbered by South Walians three to one. North against South.

I know an editor of a South Wales newspaper who refuses to employ anyone from the North.

HALF NELSONS

Aficionados of the naval novels of Patrick O'Brian pontificate on whom his hero Captain Aubrey is modelled. The latest nomination is the admirable Vice Admiral Edward Pellew, a boy from a humble background who joined the navy where his fighting qualities brought swift promotion, culminating in the command of a Fleet. Viscount Cochrane, who was imprisoned for debt, is another swashbuckling nominee. O'Brian told his stepson Count Tolstoy that his captain was based on a master of the Snowdon Foothounds, a pack  O'Brian followed when he lived in North Wales.

I would like to propose another North Walian of whom O'Brian must have heard: Captain Timothy Edwards - or to give him his nickname in Nelson’s Navy “Old Hammer and Nails” - squire of Nanhoron on the Llyn Peninsula. He was every bit as dashing as Nelson, as was shown in his biography “Hammer and Nails” by my chum David Beaumont Ellison.

In 1745 at the age of 14 Edwards signed on the frigate “Chesterfield” as captain’s servant, and after a brilliant career in which he rose to be a captain, died at sea on his way home from the American War of Independence.

He was a midshipman on the sloop “Sphinx” and in 1775 was posted to the newly refitted, 1,689 ton line-of-battle second rater “Ramillies” as 6th lieutenant. Fortunately he was transferred to the 75-gun “Terrible” which was about to sail for Nova Scotia. The “Ramillies” would have been a bad career move. She was commanded by Admiral Byng who, aboard her, lost Minorca to the French, was court martialled and shot.

The captain of the “Terrible” John Lockhart was more successful. “Lucky” to his men because of the ‘prizes’ (enemy ships) he acquired, he captured 14 ships and Edwards’ share was £813, the equivalent of ten years’ pay.

“Hammer and Nails” tells the story of Edwards’ promotion to captain and of his spying missions off Toulon and the many sea fights he fought that brought him a fortune in prize money.

He “swallowed the anchor” to develop his Llyn estate Nanhoron, still much the same today as when he laid it out. He was helped by his wife Margaret with whom he exchanged tender love poems.

When the American War of Independence broke out, he re-mustered, joined Rodney’s fleet and fought in a great battle off Martinique which is excitingly described in this book. He died of fever as he returned home, rich with prizes and honours.

Not knowing of his fate, his wife Margaret went to Southampton to meet him. It was customary for her not to take money for her return, relying on her husband for that. Not only did she learn she was a widow: she was stranded near penniless in Southampton. The Church refused to lend her the return fare but an unknown Independent minister did.

Author Ellison was a naval historian, a former schoolmaster working in retirement as a supermarket shelf stacker. Nothing was known of Captain Edwards until a mourning locket bought at auction in Fife was identified as having belonged to him. Ellison was hooked and started to research his subject, financed by an unexpected legacy from an aunt.

By a fluke, he found a volume of historical memoirs in Cambridge Public Library that mentioned Edwards and his Nanhoron home. He wrote to the house and got a letter back from Bettina, the wife of David Harden who is one of Edwards’ descendants. They invited him to Nanhoron and one of the best books on naval history I know is the result.

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My favourite king, Henry V, spent most of his reign abroad beating the French but every day despatches kept him informed on affairs in England which enabled him to continue to guide his kingdom in peace and prosperity. Rigorous laws he enforced made it possible for a woman to travel anywhere in England without fear.
How nice to know that our own Coalition, basking in the Mediterranean sunshine, operates a similar watchful eye.
But for them, dogs would be dancing on their hind legs on every street corner and slugs would be massacred with toxic coffee grounds in defiance of European regulations. Motorists would be free to mount kerbs, reverse without signals, probably even smoke in their cars without fear of penalty.
True we now borrow far more than we save, despite cuts in welfare, defence, library services and public lavatories. The days when servicemen could moonlight as film extras or chorus members at Covent Garden are over. We would have to hire the Foreign Legion, which has survived for centuries without winning a war, to put on a musical comedy.
There is no shortage of advice from countries that have survived our current economic disasters. Iceland, for instance, has suggested we should follow its example. They closed their banks, made sure their citizens did not suffer and reneged on their massive debts to other countries. We scorn such poltroonery. Our own plan, like most works of genius, is simple: we are going to close parliament for five years.
True, rewiring Westminster and mending the leaky lavatories will cost five billion pounds at a time when Our Gracious could review her fleet in her bath. But omelettes and eggs, omelettes and eggs. We will just have to put up with dancing dogs and motorists keeping on the grass. But at least we will be able to massacre slugs with gay abandon.

A LITTLE BIRD TOLD YOUI

When my friend Tom Firbank bought a mountain in Snowdonia he lived in a farm called Dyffryn on the slopes of the Glyders which he immortalised in his unforgettable book “I Bought a Mountain“.

“Bought it the day I saw it, in fact,” he said. “Felt like home.”

We met for the first time many years later when he came back to Wales to die but he no longer knew what to call his new abode.

“Home? How can it be? I have lived in Japan for forty years. I prefer to bow in greeting rather than shake hands.”

Being bowed at by an 85-year-old, ramrod stiff, former Coldstream Guards colonel, author of a best-selling book which has gone through 29 editions and is still in print, would be too much. So when we met in Ruthin we nodded and smiled.

He told me: “I want to get the feel of Wales again. My mother was Welsh and a cousin was High Sheriff of Monmouth.“

More unlikely was another Welsh cousin, the effete author Ronald Firbank whom Betjeman called “a jewelled, clockwork nightingale”.

Tom had just republished “A Country of Memorable Honour“, an account of a walk he took in the Fifties from Llangollen to Cardiff. It is among my favourite books about the Principality. Quite the equal to H. V. Morton’s “In Search of Wales”.

Firbank insisted: “It’s not a guide book to the country as much as to its inhabitants. I met most of the people who were working to remould Wales into what it is now. There are sad moments. I arrived to see Clough Williams-Ellis on the morning after his house burned down and found him standing in the rubble. In Aberystwyth, the nationalist Gwynfor Evans and I had a great time planning the invasion of England. An army Staff College course taught me how to invade.”

In fact he had unrivalled experience. During the war he was recalled from a new job at SHAEF to join the team planning Arnhem, where he subsequently fought with the Paras. He was the only Coldstreamer to be awarded two military crosses “in the field”.

That story of how he joined the Coldstream Guards as a ranker and rose to command a Troop of the Airborne Cavalry fighting in the Italian campaign and finally, as a colonel, fought at Arnhem, is told in another book “I Bought a Star”.

Firbank has fond memoirs of the Italian campaign.

“The main thrust of the invasion was up on the Apennine side. I was seconded to a Para brigade that fought a separate war along the Adriatic coast. We joined Roy Farran’s SAS and a private army run by a man called Popski. It was very exciting and great fun. A decent mobile war, not like that dreadful trench warfare. I must say I enjoyed the army right from the start. Never get the camaraderie ever again.”

Incredibly, for a man of his age, his third reason for returning to Wales was to write yet another book. Had he finished it, he might have called it “I Bought a Country” because it told how, after the war, he conquered the East as a super salesman for Perkins Diesels, selling their engines wherever he could find a buyer.

He said: “I was born under Gemini which means I am a traveller and restless after a little while in a place. My life has been a series of reincarnations. Sheep farmer, soldier, salesman. This job suited me because I was never out of a plane.”

His territory covered 22 countries and included China, Burma, Malaya and Japan. He was one of the first British businessmen in Japan and he loved it from the day he arrived. But it was someone else - not Firbank - who told me in what respect he was held among the Japanese industrial giants and statesmen whom he first met when they were struggling young businessmen.

He married a Japanese girl and settled in Japan because, in the Fifties, it was at the centre of things.

“It is a romantic sort of place and the countryside is like Gwynedd. Seven-tenths of it is mountain but it is a country which, apart from a little brown coal, has no raw materials. Until the end of the 19th century it was still living in the Middle Ages. Now it is the most literate country in the world. Alas, this has its drawbacks. They accept everything they are told and never question anything at all.“

BOTTLES MY FAMILY HAS FOUGHT

I am fascinated by my family history. I joined a genealogical project at the University of Oxford which traced my “matriarchal” gene back 15,000 years to the Pyrenees and from there to Finland, Norway, France and then to Britain from which I was delighted to learn we have not budged for a thousand years. Encouraged, I joined the Skidmore Name Society which traces us from a Norman knight from the village of Ecouis who came to England in 1033. I also found a long lost cousin Mary Gregory. This week she “introduced” me to some more  close relatives, three brothers who I did not know existed.

Mary offers this delightful explanation of The Unknown Uncles:

“My dad told me that his granddad and your granddad fell out over the method of making glass bottles. He believed in blowing the molten glass: your granddad used the new mechanical method. I think they also fell out with a third brother, Uncle Matthias from St Helen's, who also used the mechanical method. What is even more astonishing is that my dad's Uncle Tommy lived round the corner from your family in Portobello, Edinburgh.“

It is also remarkable that our mutual grandfathers left Scotland when both got jobs in the same English town and nary a word was spoke!

THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK

Mike Flynn, an old broadcasting chum who enjoyed last week's prophetic quote, writes:

May I suggest Lord Byron for next week?

“I must frankly confess,” says he, “that unless union and order are confirmed, all hopes of a loan will be in vain, and all the assistance which the Greeks could expect from abroad, an assistance which might be neither trifling nor worthless, will be suspended or destroyed; and what is worse, the great powers of Europe, of whom no one was an enemy to Greece, but seemed inclined to favour her in consenting to the establishment of an independent power, will be persuaded that the Greeks are unable to govern themselves, and will, perhaps, undertake to arrange your disorders in such a way, as to blast the brightest hopes you indulge, and that are indulged by your friends.”

November 1823, but it could be next week, says Mike.

TAIL PIECE

Many years ago I had a friend called Jean Morton Savage whom I dearly wished to ravage. At the time I had a motor cruiser on the river Dee at Chester called, to make things clear, “Fancy Free”. I was delighted when Jean agreed to come boating and in case I was otherwise occupied I asked my eccentric friend Walter to join us on the boat to handle the controls.

Ms Savage and I were in the stern at the exploratory stage when I sensed I was not getting her undivided attention. I looked round to see a Bithel's Pleasure Boat packed to the gunwales with Liverpool matrons flown with wine and impertinence. They were cheering and waving their arms excitedly. I also saw why.

Standing on the prow like a Rolls Royce mascot was Walter. He was stark naked. As he assumed a diving position, he cried: “ It does not matter, I am a philosopher!“ and curved gracefully into the water. Would you believe it, there wasn't a line in the Chester Courant.

For those few non-Sun readers who also resisted googling the pix of Prince Harry, you missed nothing. In one he modestly covers his genitals and in the other rear view the rear is blacked out. The photographs were scandalous merely because they were taken at all and by a guest who had eaten his food and drunk his vodka. The response of our hypocritical media was inevitable. Most took a page to complain they weren't allowed to show the pictures whilst condemning the Sun which did. Few of them miss an opportunity to publish pictures of naked women. The Daily Mail even celebrates cellulite.

Prince Harry is a dashing young bachelor serving with distinction in the airborne cavalry who, when he was training with The Blues, took his troopers for tea at Windsor Castle with his granny. Compared with great-great-great-grandfather Edward the Caresser he is a monk.

Harry's excellent step-mum is the grand-daughter of one of Edward's mistresses. The chair Edward had made to take his weight when he was mounting Parisian harlots is still a tourist attraction and his mother, Victoria, bedded game keepers and Munshies. Earlier Hanoverians included a traitor, two murderers and a brace of bigamists.

So they are just like the rest of us...

a bookish tales

A visit to a second-hand bookshop is a chastening experience for a writer. Shelf after shelf of authors, once feted but now completely forgotten, whilst on bookstalls a badly written pornographic novel sells fifty million copies. Only rarely does one come across copies of "Fame Is The Spur” which by a country mile is the finest novel I have ever read. An even greater tragedy is that neither Howard Spring, nor his contemporary Ivor Novello, nor the hilarious writer the amiable Gwyn Thomas, three of the finest creative artists Wales ever produced, are remembered in their native land. If only they had been Welsh speakers the halls would still be ringing with their praise.
Howard Spring, Britain’s best selling author in the Sixties, was born in abject poverty in Cardiff in the late 19th century. The description closest to his own childhood occurs in “Fame Is The Spur”. He wrote 14 novels, three plays, three children’s books, a volume of literary criticism and between 1939 and 1946 three semi-autobiographical memoirs.
He was one of nine children, two of whom died in childhood and a third as a soldier in World War 1 at Arras. His father was an Irish jobbing gardener who never earned more than a pound a week and died young leaving his wife to bring up the brood. He was an irritable, taciturn man who loved literature. He made his children read aloud in turns from “The Pilgrim's Progress”. If they mispronounced a word twice he clouted them. Though obviously from a good family he would never speak of his past. Spring remembered that despite the family’s poverty academics from the University often called to have long talks with him.
Howard, a sickly child, at the age of ten when his father died helped the family by chopping and selling firewood, picking rhubarb and working sixteen hours every Saturday as an errand boy. His wages were a dinner, a shilling and a couple of herrings 'for charity'. He lost the job when he took a Saturday off to sit for a scholarship.
He left school at 12 to become first an errand boy to a butcher and then a junior clerk in a shipping office. At home the family slept top to toe with legs folded in the same bed. There was no bathroom, just a ritual 'wash all over'. He left for work before eight in the morning and returned after six in the evening for four shillings a week. His mother took in washing and her only relaxation was reading Dickens.
He had his first holiday when he was 17. He and his elder brother who were inseparable decided to got to Bideford. They saved the twelve shillings and sixpence each needed for their digs and a few shillings for expenses. They had no money for fares. They used Howard’s newspaper pass for a free ride on the paddle steamer from Cardiff to Ilfracombe and proposed to walk the twenty miles to Bideford carrying a huge portmanteau containing the books without which they never moved. After ten miles, virtually collapsing in the summer heat, they decided to use the few shillings they had saved for treats on train fares for the rest of the journey.
When he was 13, a sister who cleaned the home of a sub-editor had learned there was a vacancy on his paper, the South Wales Echo, for a messenger boy and copy taker. He got he job and while there submitted stories and dramatic criticism to the South Wales Daily News (now the Western Mail). Studying at night school he eventually became a reporter and nine years later moved to Yorkshire where he worked for the Yorkshire Observer. He had three and a half happy years in Bradford before he moved to the Manchester Guardian



He wrote his first book, a children’s story “Darky and Co” in 1932. His first adult book, the remarkable “Shabby Tiger”, was published in 1934. One of the characters, Rachel Rosing, so fascinated him that he made her the centre of his next book “Rachel Rosing”. But it was his third book “My Son, My Son”, first published as “ Absolom, Absolom”, that made him a best-selling author all over the world. The inspiration for that book had come to him on a train journey when he saw a water trough and thought “What a place for a murderer to hide in!” On a slip of paper he wrote a brief synopsis in the five minutes the train was halted. That night he began writing the book which took him fourteen months.
I met him briefly in Manchester when I was a young reporter. He advised me always to keep a notebook and to write in it every new word I came upon. “When you write it down you will never forget it,” he said.
It is the wisest advice any writer can receive.

I If the memory of GwynThomas survives it will be of a chubby humorist stuck in the corner of the literary pub with his Celtic contemporary Brendan Behan. His novels celebrated the working class world of the Rhondda Valley He was born in Cymmer, Porth in the  Valley, the youngest of 12 children to coal miner Walter Morgan Thomas and his wife. His mother died when he was aged six, and he was resultantly brought up by his sister, often with handouts from the local soup kitchen.

After winning a scholarship to Oxford.

On graduation and wanting to be a writer, Thomas struggled to establish himself during the 1930s depression. He took on part-time lecturing jobs across England, while trying to get his novel Sorrow For Thy Sons published.[1]

Post war, his wife decided to send some of his short stories to three publishers, who all accepted the scripts for publication. Approached in 1951 by a BBC Radio Wales producer to write for the radio, he returned to his childhood memories of 1920s South Wales to create Gazuka! A delightful celebration of a bizarre musical instrumentt

He became a regular on chat shows such as the Brain's Trust, and after 20 years of teaching in 1962 he became a full-time writer and broadcaster, However, due to a combination of diabetes, heavy drinking and smoking, his health began to fail in the late 1960s. In 1981 Thomas collapsed and died on 13 April, shortly before his 68th birthday.

My great friend was his sister in law Irene Thomas, the ex chorus girl and star of “Rround Britain Quiz where she regularly beat academic heavyweights. I met Gwyn from time to time in the BBC's Cardiff Studio where he was venerated as a peerless broadcaster and he was the funniest man I have ever met. He wore a pork pie hat and lived in a cloud of words and cigarette smoke

Another artist who has slipped between time's floorboards into a dusty cellar is the distinguished concert pianist Bernard Roberts who once had international critics reaching for superlatives. Professor at the Royal College of Music, the most talented of a very talented musical family, he could talk about music in such a way as to make it understandable even to this non-musical interviewer. Best of all ,when I went to his home deep in the wild countryside beyond Harlech, he let me play with his model train set. It reproduced the line, running to a strict timetable, from Central Station in Manchester to St Pancras. It symbolises his journey through life.
“I was born at Chorlton cum Hardy, the first station after Central, and train noises were the first noises I heard,” he told me.
Before moving to Wales he lived in Leicester and studied in London. His father was assistant librarian at Manchester's John Ryland's, one of the world’s finest libraries, and assistant music critic of the Manchester Guardian under Neville Cardus. His parents met when his father went for an audition for the organist’s post at a Chorlton Congregational Church and his mother was on the audition panel.
“I think she fancied him. He got the job and they got married,” said Roberts. It was a marriage of musical minds. She had studied at the Royal College in Manchester.
When his parents heard him playing Clementi by ear at the age of four they decided it was time the youngest Roberts studied too. Before he was ten he read orchestral scores with ease and in 1949 he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music.
He played all over Europe and frequently broadcast on Radio 3. He liked the piano, a surprisingly rare gift in his trade. “Pianos are one of the horrors of being a pianist. A recital is like Russian Roulette. Every piano is different. Age, condition, maker. Like meeting someone new. You need time to get to know them before a concert.
“I went recently to choose a new piano. There was a line of them, made by the same firm within a year. All good but every one good in a different way. One bright, one mellow, one tender, another arresting. Depending on the quality of the felt, the wood - all sort of things.”
Next to the piano he loved Beethoven.
“He strives the most and transforms the most. He goes through a kind of death and resurrection. He suffers tremendously. The idea of being an outgoing performer, turned in on himself through deafness and having to struggle with this infirmity, then producing these works out of his inner hearing, is quite wonderful and very moving.
“One can identify with him. Some composers are so beautiful it is impossible to identify with them. I love Bach but I don’t know who he was as a man. I don’t know who Mozart was. It is very difficult to hear the touch of humanity in their almost perfect music.
“Mozart was more miraculous than Beethoven. And Bach is totally miraculous. To be able to conceive the B Minor Mass and write it down is quite astonishing. But I cannot understand them the way I understand Beethoven.”
So affable was Bernard Roberts, so wise in such a gentle way, I was emboldened to ask him a question I have carried in my non-musical head all my life: What is music?
“Music is an orderly succession of sounds which have a certain relationship. Within one note there is a harmonic series which contains almost all the others, just as one colour contains other colours. It is a completely natural phenomenon. You can strike a glass and hear all these harmonics. In one note there is virtually the whole scale as we know it.
“The most exciting thing about music happens when you start playing one note after another, because then you find that all the notes have a relationship. Your musical soul is being moved because you are being passed from one note to another.
“But it is the interval between the notes that is mysterious. I can play C and I can play G. What moves you is what lives between them. But this is the point which places you in the realm of the untouchable or the spiritual. It is not the silence: it is the inner space which exists between sounds.
“Tone quality, the difference between the oboe and the violin, is beautiful, but essentially the notes themselves contain the expressive quality which lives between them. Melody usually lives between an audible range, say an octave. But the fence within which it lives can be narrowed or extended.”



THOSE WERE THE DAYS
From the splendidly named Sir Laming Worthington-Evans, secretary of state for war nearly a century ago: "If the Arab population realised that the peaceful control of Mesopotamia ultimately depends on our intention of bombing women and children, I'm very doubtful if we shall gain that acquiescence of the fathers and husbands of Mesopotamia to which the Secretary of State for the Colonies looks forward." He was referring to Iraq in the 1920s; he could have been talking about Syria today.

BREAD AND CIRCUSES

We are all Romans now so let us harken to the words of that supreme classicist Boris Notquitegoodunov:

“Team GB’s gluttonous desire for gold shows no sign of being sated. Their extraordinary efforts have brought rapture to streets, parks and living rooms in London and all over the country, if not the planet.”


The chief executive of Coca-Cola, that well known drug, defended the role of Olympic sponsors saying that without them the Games would not be anything like as “rich an event”.


Lord Moynihan wants the Government to improve school sports, apparently unaware that the government encouraged Heads to sell school sports fields.


Stop the world! One Elwyn Court, March, wishes to get off.


After being tricked into accidentally watching some luckless brutes hurl themselves over a fence I did find myself cheering Sir Steve Redgrave.
Five seconds after he won a fourth rowing gold some commentator had asked for his reaction. "If I ever sound like I might do this again," he puffed, "F**kin' shoot me."


If - and I doubt it - the Olympics are remembered for anything by mid- October it is the threat that Boris is going to be our next Prime Minister. I would have thought we have had enough experience of Bullingdon hearties to put us off for life; though he has shown talent for one essential attribute: he is a good talker. Our present leaders Tweedledumb and Tweedleme got their jobs by talking. David Davis, who showed principle and common-sense, lost by a breath. Boris wins Freudian hearts and minds by waving the Union Jack and shouting for a ladder whilst dangling helplessly from a wire pulled by an inefficient European. A potent job description


His next crowd puller will be to drift helplessly heavenwards in a hot air balloon which can only be controlled by deflation. A sure vote-winner.


Regeneration of London, I hear you ask? Don't ask me. Ask any London trader. The streets of the capital are deserted. Tourists are practically down to single figures, restaurants are empty, shops are all but giving away goods and hotels are reducing prices in what should be their best months. Flat lining Britain is down to its last luncheon voucher; our most respectable bank is accused of laundering billions of dollars of blood money; staff at Care Homes for the mentally unwell are only marginally kinder than the guards in the Bastille; old people's homes and public lavatories are closing; welfare is being cut...


Outside the magic Olympian Home of the Gods amateur sports clubs are closing for lack of funds; very few state schools still have playing fields; overseas trading is back to beads and mirrors level and the world economy is in the unbreakable grasp of an Uber Mafia. Wall Street is badmouthing British banks in a move to wrest dominance from the City.


But see us ride a bike, a horse, or jump over a fence to win fools' gold medals. That is what it means to be British.


Regeneration? Do we have to have an elaborate sports day before slums can be cleared? If I want planning permission for a greenhouse, do I have to dig a swimming pool in the lawn? If we had not wasted billions on side shows we could have cleared twice as many slums. America spent the money it saved by not having the Games on real regeneration.


Demonstrations of athletic prowess? They are exclusively glorifying gold medal winners. Hear our asinine commentators... “He will have to make do with a silver,” one brays. Eclair Balding, the Head Girl who objected to being called a dyke on a bike and advised a winning jockey to get his teeth fixed, headed a feeding frenzy round a Chinese school child. She DID win a gold medal in record time but all that proved was that she was high on drugs, the pack claimed. Her parents told us Chinese training methods are so hard that when she phoned home she was always crying and a top official confirmed she had been tested free of drugs.
The aptly named Gaby Logan devotes a segment of her programme to the Underdog of the Week. She mocks competitors who don't do well to the soundtrack of a silly tune. A poor reward for the years of training any athlete must undergo just to qualify.
****************************
My own choice of sporting dexterity involves the skilful use of the knife and fork - or indeed the chopstick.


The very names of Chinese food are celebratory... Five Willows fish; Chicken Chessmen; Velvet and Satin Chicken, made with golden needles (dried lily flowers) and cloud ears (tasty fungus); Yang Chow; Lion’s Head (sounds more exciting than meat balls); and my favourite, Cloud Swallows, chicken-filled filo pastry, moulded to resemble Imperial Goldfish.
The Chinese take food and drink with becoming seriousness. In his seminal book “The Importance of Living” the Chinese scholar Lin Yutang lists twenty-one proper moments for drinking tea, including “when the children are at school”. It is bad manners to eat until all are ready or the host says “Sack fen” (nice rice). Rude to point chopsticks upwards or at anyone, but not to spit out bones or lift your bowl to your mouth. When replete, place chopsticks horizontally on plate, not bowl.
Chinese New Year marks the return of the God of the Kitchen after ascending to heaven to report on his earthly family to Sheung Duy, the Almighty God. Back in those happy days when we lived in Wales, at Chinese banquets we all wore finery to pay respect to ancestors, family and friends. I was able to omit the tradition of settling all debts. I am a dead ringer for the Chinese God of Prosperity, who is mostly belly, though there, alas, the resemblance ends (HSBC managers please note.)
The best banquet I have ever eaten included two kinds of soup,Thai chicken salad, Cantonese roast pork, Japanese sushi, potato cakes, chicken wings and tempura, Chinese dumpling, lobster crackers, Dim Sum, spare rib, roast duck, Malay pork satay, Mongolian beef, Indonesian chicken curry, Thai red curry and four different puddings. As George Meredith wisely said, “Kissing don’t last; cookery do!”



One Chinese New Year I won a rabbit in the raffle. Thank Sheung Duy, I did not win a dragon.



MY HEROES REVISITED
Now that the newspaper column has become the Chiltern Hundreds for unwanted editors and their wives, it gives a poignant pleasure to read again two of the masters of the genre. (Note to the young or foreign: The Chiltern Hundreds is the office without power given to politicians who have outlived their usefulness but could turn nasty if abandoned.)
“Cassandra at His Finest and Funniest” and “The Best of Mulchrone” have both been re-published by Revel Barker, rapidly becoming Archivist to our Inky Trade.
Inevitably comparisons are made. My own view is that Cassandra had the edge on Mulchrone, which is a bit like saying Byron had the edge on Milton.
I would put Cassandra on a level with the great essayists like Lamb, Hazlitt, Coleridge at his best and de Quincey. And that is the highest compliment I can pay. Only Montaigne reigns supreme. But he, of course, invented the genre.
Viewed as literature, such columnists as Bill Connor (Cassandra), Mulchrone and Ian Mackay (who founded their school in the News Chronicle) are truer to their roots in Montaigne than the novel has been to its beginnings. From Thomas Deloney, the first  novelist, a pedlar who tramped the roads of East Anglia in the days of the first Elizabeth, selling his tales on market stalls, through the “journey” books of Fielding et alia to the last thriller novels of Dickens and Wilkie Collins, only the detective novel has followed a discernible succession.
Mulchrone, Connor and Mackay obeyed Montaigne’s dictum that the only subject he was qualified to write about was himself.
They had his eye for anecdote. He tells of an old woman in his village who was raped by fourteen soldiers and said it was the only time she had ever been pleasured without sin. He busied himself amongst life’s trifles and gave them importance.
Of the three writers under advisement, Mulchrone is, in my view, the best reporter. His account of the Denbigh Pie is my favourite piece of reporting. It is written with love, but with a gimlet eye that misses nothing. He was equally good on greater occasions like the wedding of Princess Alexandra to the Hon Angus Ogilvy, in which he correctly saw a love match.
“Their happiness in each other lit the old stones, dimmed the light of the monster called TV, put pomp in its place,” he wrote.
And later: “They smiled their joy right at the great challenging head of the Archbishop of Canterbury. And his Grace of Canterbury just had to smile back ….... IT WAS AS IF THE NORTH FORELAND HAD BROKEN INTO A GRIN.”
To appreciate that magnificent line you would have to have seen Archbishop Ramsay who was forever old. Mulchrone denied authorship of his most famous line “Two rivers flowed…” About the only writer I know who would have been so honest.
Cassandra’s quiver of words was bigger and he used it to deadlier effect: “A hangover is when your mouth tastes like a tram driver’s glove. When your boots seem to be steaming and your eyes burn in their sockets like hot gooseberries.”
He was a great Word War Wager, his invective darkening the skies like the arrow night of Crecy. His hatred of the Christmas Card Artillery was Olympian. “I am an old gunner in the Christmas card Artillery…”
I only met Cassandra once, when we briefly shared a urinal in Withy Grove, Manchester. Mulchrone was an old and deeply valued friend. Mackay I met occasionally in the Manchester Arms where he shared a drink with another of my heroes, Whitney Rowland.
I once told Victoria de Los Angeles that if my house caught fire the first thing I would save would be her recording with Jussi Bjorling of “La Boheme”. I lied. I would save Cassandra, Mulchrone, and Mackay.
Happily their tradition of fine writing survives. Add the name of Geoff Mather who shed gold on the pages of the Daily Express in the days when it was still a newspaper and happily survives to write a sparkling weekly blog. Try him at: http://www.northtrek.co.uk

BRING BACK THE QUILL

My battle with the New Age makes a flash in the pan of the Hundred Years War. I have had a calendar watch for twenty years and I still cannot set the date. My Weather Master refused to disclose the temperature. I tend to wander off in department stores whilst my wife chooses the clothes she will inevitably return on her next visit. I have had four mobile phones to summon help but have not so far been able to make a call.jThe all-singing, all dancing scanner/printer won't but the Digital Voice Recorder seemed a gift from heaven. Speak your thoughts and watch them appear as if by magic on your manuscript.
Simply a matter of slipping in the CD provided, following the instructions which will appear on your screen and it's away dulled digit. Except that it wasn’t. The process defeated two highly trained computer mechanics when I failed. I took wider advice. Upgrade it, I was advised. So I set aside Dragon Speaking 10 and bought Dragon Speaking 11 CD.
That didn’t work either so I contacted Amazon for a refund. No can do, said Amazon. You have already opened the envelope. I wondered how I could have found out it was the wrong software without opening the envelope. But I contacted Nuance who supply the software and a nice chap said, “What software have you got?” and I told him with quiet pride I not only had Software 10 but I had also paid £40 for software 11, and he said “Well neither is any good.” Olympus had given me the wrong software, he said. But obliging chap that he was, he offered to download software 10.1 which he said was the appropriate CD, and he did.
I keyed it in and clicked where ordered. At first everything went as promised and then I was instructed to key in my customer number and it was rejected. I tried again and again. I was rejected. All over the next two days I tried and was rejected again and again.
At this point I must have lost my nerve because I went scurrying back to a nice lady at Nuance with whom by this time I was on Christian name terms. She very kindly tried the download herself and said it had worked for her. So I went back to the keyboard and this time a notice appeared saying it was a zip file and if I would press the download button all would be well. So I pressed the download button and got a notice saying if I would press another download button my problems would be over.
At this point my typing finger objected. It said it was working harder than ever and I had told it how I was going to make things easier for it. I was in no mood for argument so I rapped its knuckle and it went on its weary way. This time pressing the button brought a notice from someone called Reg Work, saying there were 165 errors on the machine and offering, very sportingly, to clear things up with a free trial. Up to this time there had been a noticeable shortage of gift horses so with a glad cry I complied. And that pressure on a button brought a bill for £34, which I thought might be my one finger getting its own back, but I paid and got another button telling me that my life would be made easy if I backed up my files. By now I was too weak to demur and that cost me another ten quid. I forget what the next tempting offer was but I know that when I had accepted it I was down £100 over a five-minute involuntary spending spree. So I emailed my friend Flora on Nuance in a craven bid for sympathy.
She obviously had summed up my degree of technical expertise by this time because she said probably the best idea would be to ask Olympus who sold the recorder to send me a CD 10.1 which would get round the problem with ease.
And there the matter has ended and I await the next email with a nervous Cousteau-like twitch.
Except that I got an email from some one called Trial Play telling me that my Winzip software was ready and if I would press the download below it would be delivered. I pressed the download and nothing happened. By this time I was whimpering noisily so I emailed Trial Play support and back came an email quick as a flash. It said they would answer my esteemed enquiry in 48 hours.

At which point I broke into song, a reedy tenor with nervous gulps: “I’ll join the Legion, that’s what I’ll do....and in some far distant region I’ll fight for the right .....” but the rest of that stirring aria from the Red Shadow was drowned in melancholy.

WHAT'S IN A NAME

Long ago when the world was still grown up - say until the 1950’s - there were Yanks and Red Indians, Paddies and Jocks, Taffs and Eyties, Frogs and Krauts, and God Botherers and Left Footers.

Unthinkable in these enlightened times when, according to a Broadcasting Standards Survey we once debated on my radio programme “The Big Idea”, Jew and Spastic are now serious swear words.

But in that terrible past old ladies were not frightened to leave their homes nor beaten to death in them. Teachers taught, and education had not yet been replaced by theories of how it should be done. Few schoolchildren were illiterate, hardly any pregnant, and Foreign Secretaries paid for their mistresses on trips. It wasn’t a capital offence to be a catholic or a protestant.

There was still a wicked British Empire - but Africa had not collapsed into anarchy. You could turn on a radio or a TV set without being greeted with a mouthful of obscenities and eroticism was conveyed, not photographed. Governments dealt only in major issues and you could trust local councils to repair the drains.

Christmas started in December and parents, not children, decided what clothes they wore. At school, uniforms were universal so that poorer children would not be sartorially embarrassed by richer classmates. You did not have to be fit to risk going to hospital, where you are now likely to come out with more germs than you were admitted with.

The police hadn’t discovered how much easier life was if they confined their attentions to respectable taxpayers and £2,000 was the fine for running a brothel, not (as in the fairly recent past) for selling an oxtail. I am not sure that even then you could leave your keys in your car or your front door. But there was hardly a shop with an iron grille and aspirin was the strongest drug.

There were even people sufficiently familiar with our historic past to know - as I keep having to point out - that “welshing” was an insult to the English, not the Welsh. In medieval Wales, English law was confined to the castle towns. In the countryside outside, Welsh law prevailed. Vide, place names like Welsh Frankton. English traders who got into debt in the castle towns would abscond to the “Welshery” and were said to have “welshed”.

In 1924, in his fine book “In Search of Wales”, H.V Morton pointed out there was no blame for the Welsh either in the famous lampoon “Taffy was a Welshman...” The rhyme is a corruption of a Low Dutch lampoon on priests whose tall black hats were called Tayfs.

TALE PIECE

.......... And God spoke unto Adam and He said:

"Why does it take you so long to come to the phone?"

Adam said: "Have you seen the size of this garden?

Also I wish you would have a word with that angel you sent

with a blazing sword. I've got scorch marks on the dahlias and

the heat is bringing on the chrysanths too early........"

God said: "The Angel is Security and outside

my remit.

But there has obviously been a mistake.

He shouldn't be there till apple picking....... "

God said: "I wanted Dobermans but Finance

estimate an overall saving with flames that is very impressive.

It's something they picked up from the Competition.

We are working on garden staffing levels.

Research and Development were going to let you invent the

plough, then we planned electricity

which I personally am very excited about and cannot wait to

create Farraday."

Adam said: "Talk is cheap. When do I get to invent the

plough?"

God said: "R and D have come up with this new concept.

Run it up the tree trunk and see if it flaps."

Adam said;: "God,sometimes you say things which are a mystery

to me...."

God said: "Goes with the territory. But

about this R and D idea. It will do the gardening; it's an

entertainment concept and does home nursing. R and D are working

on a modem called sex which completely

does away with the spare rib method I originally planned.

It will need a User Manual. I'm thinking of calling it

the Ten Commandments."

Adam said: "Does this machine have a name?"

God said: "What's in a name,as Shakespeare is

going to say. We were going to call it a slave and then a

skivvy but Marketing said names like that give off the wrong

vibes, consumer-wise. So what we finally came up with was

Woman.

“What takes the Woe out of Man....Woman. Neat,eh?

Copywriting and Graphics reckon we could achieve a 98 per

cent penetration of A and AB markets."

Adam said: "I want an assurance from management that this

woman machine will never be programmed to take executive

decisions......"

And God spoke and He said: "Thursday already? I have to

go. I have two days creating before my rest day...."

And He rang off.

It was only later when Eve harvested the

apples and there was this Leak from

Head Office about relocation that Adam remembered he had

been given no guarantees about negative parity for the woman

machine.

And Adam was sore afraid.

DRINK TO ME ONLY WITH THINE IOU

sThirty years ago I was awarded the drinker's knighthood “Arise Cirrhosis”. Twenty-three years ago a lifetime's fieldwork in competitive drinking was acknowledged with the award of diabetics Mark Two. That was the birthday my son - “Oh Sharper than a Serpent's tooth” - made me a present of sixty bottles of spring water.

The Ferret should have got some kind of award for forty-two years of attempting to dash the glass from my lips. Negotiations for a cease supping have been going on at Skidmore Parva for the thick end of half a century. They reached their apogee on that fateful birthday, which was followed by five years in desert conditions. Oddly enough the treaty broke down during a coach trip down the Loire. I was alarmed to discover that also on the coach was an ex-girl friend. When a trip was mooted to a vineyard I bravely opted for the alternative which was a visit to a church.

“I think I'll go with you,” said the ex. The ferret is very relaxed in these matters. When I am moved to sparkle at a pretty girl she laughs derisively but I know my limits. I hastily beat a retreat to the vineyard where I could not resist a proffered Sancerre, the flinty taste of which was appreciated by my favourite writer Hemingway. I sipped daintily at no more than a couple of bottles as a Homage to Hem. Flown with wine and impertinence, I was bold enough to add a clause to the contract permitting me to drink when abroad.

As luck would have it Rod Henshal, my partner in a programme I did for Australian radio, proposed a visit and the question of entertaining him came up. Fortunately I remembered a builder I knew called Shone who divided his time between a villa in Portugal and a rather nice manor house in Chester. When his marriage broke up he kept hold of the Cheshire house by declaring it Portuguese territory.

My ancestors were Norman so I declared our house, Aberbraint, part of France. It must have appealed to my wife's highly developed sense of the absurd because she agreed.

We left our riverside manor house, built by One Leg Paget, Wellington's cavalry commander at Waterloo,when my wife inherited a Fenland stately bungalow over which I have no property rights. It was some years before I got her to agree to champagne with our fish and chips on Friday and libations for the rest of the weekend. Because she is posh I naturally took that to mean Friday to Monday but was voted down. Friday was OK because she likes champagne with her fish and chips but Monday is dry.

She won in the end because I have lost the taste for alcohol.

Teetotalism is dangerous. It allows you to do much sillier things than ever you did as a drunk. I have been persuading myself that since I seldom venture further than the garden the last thing I need is an Ipad. Last week in a bout of sober frenzy I bought one and spent the next days proving that I would never be able to make it work. So I sent it back, and because I had already given my Kindle to my wife I bought a Kindle Touch. Before I even opened that I had to spend the better part of a day adapting my wife's Kindle to her needs. Then began the worst three days of my life. The Kindle Touch is more than a little touched itself. It refuses point blank to do anything it purports to do and my fingers are so fat they punch several keys at a time on the keyboard. In consequence it took several hours creating a password of seven letters for the router. I do not even like to recall how long it took to copy my books, newspapers and magazines from her Kindle to my Touch. I finished it this morning - and then the world fell in. The postman brought an anonymous gift from a well wisher.
It was a Nexus7 tablet.
I should have swallowed it. The guide to this fiendish machine was printed online, an innovation praised by one purchaser who crowed his joy that Nexus had dispensed with printed guides: “Grandfatherly concepts have no place in the 21^st century.” But by the time this great-grandfather has read the instruction online and gone back to the item awaiting change he has forgotten what the instructions were. So I sought aid from some nice people to whom I have become close. They are the Indian gentlemen from Amazon.
This was their reply:
“If a Kindle application is not installed on your Nexus 7, please install it.

“Kindle for Android can be installed on Android devices running OS 2.2 or greater.

To see what version your Android device has, tap the Menu button from the home screen, choose 'Settings', then tap on 'About tablet'. The version number can be found under Firmware version.

To install Kindle for Android through the Android Market, tap the 'Market' icon and search for Kindle. Tap on Kindle for Android to open the application’s detail page and follow the instructions to install. Android devices that do not have the Google Play Store pre-installed may not be supported.

“If you are running Android OS 2.1, you will still have the option to download Kindle for Android version 3.2 from the Google Play Store.

Please note, Android devices that do not have the Google Play Store pre-installed may not be compatible with the Kindle for Android app. If you encounter an issue installing Kindle for Android, please confirm your device has the Google Play Store app pre-installed before troubleshooting further.”

Tomorrow I will set the dog on the postman.
****************************************************



It has been a funny sort of week.

We had an email this morning purporting to be from an old chum saying he was broke and desperate for a loan after being mugged on holiday. It was unlikely. He has just sold the business which he created from scratch for £115 million. I sent him this: “To get such a letter from a distinguished member of the Rich List over so many years is both flattering and humbling. I can offer 50 pence or a luncheon voucher plus a small collection of centimes involuntarily collected on a day trip to Calais. Any use? Ian P.S. Celia can offer half a loaf of stale bred for your race horses if you can tell us where in Newmarket they are stabled.” He replied: “It is always possible to fall on hard times! Centimes, Euros, Yen, $, they all come in handy! Your offers are therefore hugely welcome and should be sent to the nearest branch of the Bank of Nigeria - don't delay, it may be closed before you get there. “Likewise Celia's offer of bread for the horses (not cake!) will go down a treat once it gets to the horses in......... where they are now on starvation diets ( a likely story). “The lesson to be learned from being scammed is don't tell anyone your greatest secrets (notably email passwords), but if you do, the compensation is that hundreds of people enquire after your well being which can be very pleasant. It is good to know that people care. It is something that runs countercurrent to what so many would have us believe.”

My fiery friend Alastair McQueen, proud father of an Argyll wounded in Afghanistan, favoured me with the following despatch:

“If His Lordship, at the risk of appearing curmudgeonly, would refer to an email I sent last night with pictures from the Olympics of Servicemen he will see that a special new Tactical Recognition Flash is being sported by our Gallant soldiery. It is an Olympic TRF, believe it or not. Who the hell is paying for this? The soon-to-be-disbanded Argylls can be seen wearing it on the left shoulder rather than on the right where they proudly sport the TRF of their predecessors in the 91st & 93rd of Foot - The Thin Red Line.

You may wish to sound off about this next week.”

Your wish is my command.

The first games of the modern Olympics took place in Athens in 1896. Forty-six years earlier, in 1850, a local surgeon William Penny-Brookes who introduced physical education into British schools, had inspired the fore-runner for the "promotion of moral, physical and intellectual improvement" and although the Games' venue is now decided by international committee rather than by the Wenlock Olympian Society, it still holds its own Olympics every July - "The old woman's" race for a pound of tea may yet be re-introduced! Baron de Coubertin was inspired to create the global event after a visit to the games in Much Wenlock., Shropshire. The influential and wealthy Frenchman was suitably inspired and shared Brookes' dream of a modern, international games.

Since the ersatz IOC fines shop keepers who copy its logo should not the Wenlock Olympiad demand a hefty fine from the plagiarist IOC for copying the entire games?

The opening concert? I enjoyed the tableaux but hope they will do a reprise in English. McCartney called “Hey, Jude” but answer came there none. He is far too old to be out so late. I couldn't abide the singer of Abide With Me. The BBC saved money by having one girl commentating but there was interference from two men that added nothing.

Was the ceremony worth £25 million? No. The money would be better spent re-opening the libraries, lavatories and all the other amenities that have recently been cut to save money.

P.S. We are a two-hour drive from the nearest Olympic venue. Our gardener Paul broke down on a motorway near here at 2 pm on Friday. He summoned assistance. It arrived at 11 pm. “ It's the Olympics,” the mechanic explained.