The Times

What do you think of "The Times" today?

Frankly, my dear, I think that is just as bad as it has always been.

 I have been reading your paper since it was known as the threepenny edition of  "The Daily Worker" and it has not changed much. Morals are drawn from sporting victories ("play up, play up and play the game") and it has always leant towards the left. There is, of course, the crossword but does this really compensate for its other deficiencies including the sententious tone of its editorial, followed by each of the editors who all speak "de haut en bas" to its hapless readers?

Bloggery

The comments on Cameron are not quite what I wanted. They are much too polite. In blogging one can be as rude as one likes. I think he is doing a rotten job.

Please note: Comments need to go into the box marked "comments".  Those sent by e-mail have to be sorted out.  Wot a chore!

The Case of the Missing Prime Minister

Where is Mr. Cameron?  The question needs to be asked.  It is some months since the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced reductions in public spending and these are now coming into effect.  They are not being well received by the students and their supporters and there will be more violence in the streets when the cuts in services finally come through our system of payments. In the meantime we have heard practically nothing from the Prime Minister.

It was always going to be a difficult task to persuade the nation that these cuts were necessary and Mr Cameron's silence has made it more difficult.  He should have passed the last few months stumping up and down the country explaining that our problems had been created by a profligate Chancellor (later the Prime Minister) who was spending three billion pounds a week more than he could afford.  Everyone could have understood that and almost nobody could have objected to such a message.

Instead of that, Mr Cameron disappeared and left his underlings to play the old game of  "Split the People" by blaming the bankers (Mr Osborne) and the fairly rich (Mr Cable).  This has led us to the grotesque sight of Mr Osborne ticking off bankers and Mr Cable supporting the 50% top rate of income tax. Surely the Prime Minister cannot be right to let such a distortion of the facts to take place.  Our troubles have been caused by Gordon Brown and everybody should know this.

We obviously have to cut public spending but that alone will not free us from the chains of poverty.  We should talk about growth instead of "cuts" and lay the blame where it belongs.  For growth we need sensible bankers supporting happy millionaires who can invest money in job creating enterprises in the knowledge that the they will not have to pay nearly half their eanings as income tax. 

Mr Cameron is spoken of as a well educated man yet most of his working life has been spent in public relations before he entered politics.  Before that he acquired a first class  degree in PPE at Oxford.  If this is the best that a university education can do I would advise students to keep away from them altogether.



 

Freud Fried

Nothing has pleased me more than the destruction of the reputation of Sigmund Freud over the last few years.  The first shots were fired when Sir Peter Medawar (the Nobel prize winner) described psychoanalysis as "the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth
 century" and followed it up with a brief dismissal.  This was in the New York Review of Books a few years ago.
Since then there has been a satisying flow of books about the old charlatan. T.he best one to start with is "The Memory Wars" by Frederick Crews.  After that serious readers can take up a much larger tome, "Why Freud was Wrong" by Richard Webster.  I shall come back to this subject later on  when I cannot think of anything else to say.

* A man goes to see his doctor. "Doctor, doctor; I am suffering from constipation.  Shall we use short  words or long ones?"  "Short ones course." So we did,

Winter is a Cummin' in

Nothing in the refrigerator as the delivery man from Waitrose has broken his arm and cannot deliver, so we are forced out to a retaurant for our evening meal.  The first one we go to is fully booked but we manage to squeeze in to our second choice which fills up shortly after we arrive. The noise.  The people. Whatever happened to the credit crunch?

Everyone is filling up and spending while they can, waiting until VAT gets its boost and the job losses really start coming through.  Have Dave and the Schoolboys got it  right?  Even if they do cut it as much as they say they will, we shall ll be spending too much.  What is to become of us all?

We ate quite well and Waitrose have now hired a taxi.  So that put off the evil day again.

Doctor Spooner

We have all been thinking about poor old Doctor Spooner have not we? It was he of course who became immortal when he told  a pupil that he had tasted a whole term.  After that everybody in Oxford was trying to do it. "We must remember our queer old dean" and "Stop nicking your pose" are two of the better ones. But the most technically accomplished one is so disgusting that I find that I cannot write it.

Students

What has gone wrong?
1. Some lunatic(Wilson? Blair?) declared hat fifty per cent of all school leavers should have further education.
2.This was quicky converted into the necessity to have more universities which sprang up like mushrooms.
3.  There followed a binge when anybody could have his or her tuition for nothing i.e. paid for by the taxpayers.
4.Screams and howls followed the introduction of student fees.  But they were paid.
5. Pleading poverty, the government has tried to hike the fees up by a lot and riots have broken out.

BUT

There are too many students and not enough universities.
Let us build a lot more universities and fill them with the students who can't get in.
Keep plenty of places at the new colleges for foreign students who would have to pay a big premium and thus provide enough money for all the students now living here.
We might even become a net exporter of education as so many people want to  say
 they have been educatedin England.

This is not so silly as it sounds.


Nigella's bosom seems to have got even bigger.  Not a good idea.

Child Poverty

Can someone tell me what is meant by "Child Poverty"?  Of course if you take a child of poor parents then he must be poor himself.  If those parents make sure that he has plenty of siblings then the government will pay the parents more money but not enough to make the original child better off.  How then do we end child poverty?  Birth control?  Dr Marie Stopes would certainly have thought so.

Note:  Dr Stopes was not a doctor of medicine but a palaeontologist.  She was surprised to discover that she was still a virgin after a year of marriage.  My thoughts wander.

Birthday of Virtuoso

Today is the one hundredth birthday of Edmundo Ros who led a small South American band in a night club in Mayfair when he was much younger.  I have called him a virtuoso but cannot remember what he played.  Pehaps it was the Camel's Stomach an undemanding instrument that he led from the front.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, EDMUNDO

U S Sneers at our Troops

"Thanks Yanks for all those guns and tanks" must be just about the worst song that came out of the second World War.  Nevertheless we were pathetically grateful at the time for we needed every bullet we could get.  Sixty years later the situation is just as bad.

The Labour party has always hated spending money on defence and so it was a surprise that when "New" Labour came along its leader was keen on fighting wars.  ,And after a succession of skirmishes we found ourselves fighting in the Middle East with too few troops and antique equipment.  No wonder the Americans, backed up by a huge supply of guns, tanks and Hershey Bars,  are not impressed.  But who would have expected us to need to spend so much money when Tony Blair and his friends came to power? Labour had always been docile in the face of agression.  How we were to know that we now had a leader set on poncing around on the world stage and keeping in with  America where he was to earn his living after he had done his time as Prime Minister?    

Say "No" to Students' Protests

A snowball struck my window pane;
It made a most impressive "Thunk".
Was this some student's prank again
Or just a piece of mindless junk?

Worry, worry worry

Anxiety is big business these days.  What is there to worry about?  Let me count some of the ways:

Nuclear War
Overpopulation
The Korean crisis
Global Warming
Energy depletion
AIDS
Plague,

That is enough.  The answer to these problems is to adopt anxiety denial.  There is so much to worry about that it is not worth worrying at all.

May Day, May Day

It is no use calling for help. The Euro is doomed.  First Greece, now Ireland, next Portugal and so on until the clever men who thought up the scheme meet a country who will not be bullied into sinking into a morass of debt.  And that will be the end of the whole ridiculous enterprise.  But what a long time it will take as one crisis follows another and the unthinkable becomes thinkable.  How BOOOOOOORING!

Polar Bears

>Mummy, Mummy.  Why do we have to always ask for plastic bags?

>It's to stop polar bears from falling through the ice.

>I do wish you would stop telling me these stupid fairy tales.  I'm seven yars old now.<

Has anyone noticed that twenty nine is a prime number?

A Fine piece of Talk

Fifty years ago Ireland was wonderfully poor.  Was I naive in thinking that the people were happy?  Women seemed to do most of the work and certainly the men did most of the drinking.  Living well was the aim of life as we drove over the uncluttered roads where every lorry was carrying bottles or barrels.  And every  modest village had an auction of horses going on:

The proper study of mankind, of course,
Is not technology, it is the horse.

The heroine of one of Synge's plays decides to follow the penniless hero saying only "Tis a fine piece of talk ye have.  And it's with yourself I'll go."

So there they have something to start with all over again - horses and a fine piece of talk.  Good luck to them.

Pope Blesses Condoms

Three cheers for the Pope;
Let us hope against hope
That he very soon will
Sanction the pill.

When Kate Middleton orders sticky toffee pudding at her local pub she always asks for a small helping.

Sweet Thames run softly till I end my song.

Dave's KO

Dave had not delivered the coup de grace to Lord Young when I last mentioned the subject.  WELL DONE! Now we know how brutal he can be to one of his supporters, let's see what he can do to an opponent.

Narrow Escape

Phew!  Lord Young nearly gave the game away and had to be rebuked by the Head Boy.  The noble lord said that a lot of people had never had it so good what with price cutting in the High Street and incredibly cheap mortgages.  Dave and Boy George know this of course and will tell everybody when they declare just before the next election that the recession is over and they have saved the economy single-handedly from a recession caused by Labour's profligate policies. Watch this space.

Cameron

Dave and the schoolboys have just managed to squeeze  into Parliament so that Dave can play at  being Prime Minister after fighting  an appalling campaign and having to gang up with little Cleggie. Actually Dave quite likes leading a coalition as he always has someone to blame when things go wrong.  Meanwhile he can bang on about the Big Society until someone tells me what he means by it.  One thing is certain: it is not inspiring. More thoughts on Dave to come.

Ballet

Everything was beautiful at the ballet the other night when we saw the white hope of English dancing Laura Cuthbertson dancing oh so very beautifully Sylvia.  They wanted to make her change her name but she stuck to her guns.  Edris Stannus became Dame Ninette de Valois.  To what  should we change Cuthbertson?

Agony at Fort Wayne

So this is Fort Wayne Indiana

Yellow corn stretched to the low horizon as I emerged from the airport built of rusting steel.  A single decrepit taxi was waiting.  I got in.

The driver wanted to talk.

Ain't it a shame what a woman can do to you?  Seven years we've been together and today she just said, "I'm gonna let you screw me one more time then you can git!"  So I did what she said and gave it to her good and hard then she threw me out.  I never felt worse.

The world is always the same even in Fort Wayne Indiana

Three o'clock in the morning

The title of a maudlin old music hall song as the red nosed comedian staggered from one lamp post to another. He was drunk but that is the time that I am never more sober and ready to take on the world in disputation.  So look out!

Preface

To blog or not to blog; that is the question.
No it isn't.
To brag or not to brag; that is more like it.

So what's my excuse? I pledge my age.

I have reached the time when the days are taken up with precepts:

"Don't fall over.
"Don't trip over anything.
"Don't ever drop anything."

These preoccupations absorb my mind by day so who can I talk to at night -
probably about three o'clock in the morning?