Books etc in large font

My letter on the Big Society published this week in the Spectator.  Not worth reading if you have my previous blogs.

Gielgud's letters: Well written theatrical gossip from one who was always performing when he was not cruising the streets looking for beautiful young men.  In New York his eyes were "out on stalks".  Well edited with footnotes only when needed.  Noel Coward on the other hand is a disappointing letter writer  He has a tendency to drop into baby talk and the editor takes up as much space as the text.  My favourite letters are those of Lord Byron edited by Marchant.  Fifteen volumes all in their dust covers are in my shelves. They were presented to me by the M.A. as they came out.  

Embarked on Tony Judt's book on Europe since 1945, written in the best American style of journalism in the U.S.  I think it came from the founding fathers and later writers like Hawthorne and Emerson and the New Yorker.  (I saw the New Yorker a few months ago and was not impressed.  I started reading it at the end of the war when it was passed around like a samizdat(?).  It had James Thurber, A J Liebling, E B White, Edmund Wilson et al plus all those wonderful cartoons.  Things aint what they used to be.)
Anyway I had forgotten, if I ever knew, just how bad things were in Europe in 1945 with cities reduced to rubble, the people starving and diseased, the corpses piled up  in the camps while the occupying troops indulged in their usual habits of looting and raping and becoming criminals.  Some good books on the matter are coming out.  The worst excesses of the "brutal and licentious soldiery" were kept hidden fron from the Great British Public who were too busy licking their wounds and trying to mend their almost destroyed country.  The eighteen months when we stood alone may have been forgotten by David Cameron but perhaps Churchill was right when he said that this was our finest hour. By the end of hostilities it seemed far away.                        

 Victory seemed almost as bad as defeat in some areas after the latter part of the war, when the crusade against fascism had become what Evelyn Waugh called "a sweaty tug of war between indistinguishable louts".  Warfare demeans everyone, victors and victims alike.  Yet we go on with it and until recently had a Prime Minister who actually declared war without asking Parliament.  We must have been mad to let him get away with it.

This is all terribly gloomy so I leave you with something that made me laugh out loud.  Said by Ricky Gervaise when he concluding one of those award ceremonies, after he had thanked everyone he could think of, "And thank you, God, for making me an atheist."  The Americans were not amused.

Books etc current affairs

My letter on the Big Society published this week in the Spectator.  Not worth reading if you have my previous blogs.

Gielgud's letters: Well written theatrical gossip from one who was always performing when he was not cruising the streets looking for beautiful young men.  In New York his eyes were "out on stalks".  Well edited with footnotes only when needed.  Noel Coward on the other hand is a disappointing letter writer  He has a tendency to drop into baby talk and the editor takes up as much space as the text.  My favourite letters are those of Lord Byron edited by Marchant.  Fifteen volumes all in their dust covers are in my shelves. They were presented to me by the M.A. as they came out. 

Embarked on Tony Judt's book on Europe since 1945, written in the best American style of journalism in the U.S.  I think it came from the founding fathers and later writers like Hawthorne and Emerson and the New Yorker.  (I saw the New Yorker a few months ago and was not impressed.  I started reading it at the end of the war when it was passed around like a samizdat(?).  It had James Thurber, A J Liebling, E B White, Edmund Wilson et al plus all those wonderful cartoons.  Things aint what they used to be.)
Anyway I had forgotten, if I ever knew, just how bad things were in Europe in 1945 with cities reduced to rubble, the people starving and diseased, the corpses piled up  in the camps while the occupying troops indulged in their usual habits of looting and raping and becoming criminals.  Some good books on the matter are coming out.  The worst excesses of the "brutal and licentious soldiery" were kept hidden fron from the Great British Public who were too busy licking their wounds and trying to mend their almost destroyed country.  The eighteen months when we stood alone may have been forgotten by David Cameron but perhaps Churchill was right when he said that this was our finest hour. By the end of hostilities it seemed far away.                       

 Victory seemed almost as bad as defeat in some areas after the latter part of the war, when the crusade against fascism had become what Evelyn Waugh called "a sweaty tug of war between indistinguishable louts".  Warfare demeans everyone, victors and victims alike.  Yet we go on with it and until recently had a Prime Minister who actually declared war without asking Parliament.  We must have been mad to let him get away with it.

This is all terribly gloomy so I leave you with something that made me laugh out loud.  Said by Ricky Gervaise when he concluding one of those award ceremonies, after he had thanked everyone he could think of, "And thank you, God, for making me an atheist."  The Americans were not amused.

More Memories of Tripoli

It was 1946 when I found myself with the rank of Gunner on the edge of the desert, with a battalion of men waiting to be demobbed in a barracks sixty miles south of Tripoli.  It was there that I became the barman in the officers' mess.
We had nothing to do except parade and polish some big guns that had been left behind.  I was the lucky one and was "excused boots" as I mixed Tom Collins and G & Ts for the officers who at midday toiled up the hill for a relaxing afternoon of doing nothing.  Like much of war service it was stupifyingly dull.
We had a library with several  books.  Fed up with answering the question, "Why can't you speak fucking English?" I borrowed a copy of Fowler's "Modern English Usage."  It is still on loan but now in a bookshelf at home.  It fitted in very well with the Faber Book of Modern Verse and selected works of Oscar Wilde and was carried around in my kit bag. We had an open air cinema with two films, "State Fair" and "Show Boat" the last with Paul Robeson.  We also had records - 78 rpm 12".  The only complete sets we had were Brahms' 2nd Symphony and Rachmaninov's  Pagannini Variations. A General came to inspect us and was  so appalled by our slackness that he took away our guns (big ones left behind by a proper artillery regiment).  It is supposed to be the ultimate disgrace but we were delighted.  I sailed home in a troop ship.  On landing I was given some back pay - I was now earning 5/6 a day - and a badly fitting grey double breasted pin stripe suit which was given away by my mother to some passing tramp.  That was the end of my military career and I was not even "mentioned in despatches".

Fragments ar 3 a.m.

I know nothing about economics but nor do economists.  It is a pseudo -science which has no laws but only possibilities that sometimes work and sometimes do not.  With Maggie we went through a phase of adulation for Hayek and Milton Friedman.  Now it was all Keynes and it was his followers that got us  into this mess.  "Spend your way out of depression" was the cry but that led to our monumental debts.  A "two fisted" policy is what we have got from Boy George.  He lights a fire  with low interest rates and then pisses on it with ill-considered and irrelevant "cuts".   "Backwoodsman, spare that tree!"

The council have planted a tree outside our house, but it is the wrong sort of tree and will die soon. Now that is the sort of thing for the Big Society.  Where are the volunteers who will dig up the tree and replace with the right sort.  I have a spade which I will lend them.
















 

Really the Blues

I can't say how much pleasure I have had from the music played by big black men in New Orleans in the early years of the twentieth century.  From the Deep South it found its way up the Mississippi to Chicago where it picked up some white musicians and carried on to New York, changing but remaining faithful to Count Basie's dictum, "I want four good beats to the bar and no cheating."  After that it got hi-jacked by clever men who brought their intellect to bear on music that should come from the heart and not  from the head.  See Philip Larkin's essay on this, "Pound, Picasso, Parker".  But that attacked the entire modern movement in the arts.  More anon.

                                                      Mr Jelly Roll

I  aint gonnan give nobody none of this jelly roll.....

Gonna wear out both ma shoes

When they play that Jelly Roll Blues........

That Bessie Brown so brazen and bol'

Laft in ma face and stole ma jelly roll

So now, I'm tired of fattening frogs for snakes.......

In the 1930's Lord Reith at the BBC, where Jelly Roll Morton, whose music was sometimes played on the wireless, was told of the origin of the great man's nickname.  From thereon he had to be called J. R. Morton.  How things have changed.

Dave's Problem

The answer is that Dave is not really very bright.  He is lacking in intellect even tho he got a first at Oxford. Such a distinction is easy to obtain for anyone who works hard enough and can sit through an exam.  In spite of this he has made some ghastly mistakes like forgetting the history of World War 2 and not knowing the meaning of the word "twat".  This leads him into making appalling choices of advisors who he believes will do his thinking for him.  They in turn have by the time he gets to them done all their useful work so he lurches from one catch phrase to another like a drunk man in the street lurching from one lamp post to another.  How else can we explain, "we're all in this together" which is manifest nonsense as he and the Boy George will always be able to afford taxation however high it becomes.  As it is he lays all the burden on middle earners who see their spending power whittled away day by day.

And this leads to "The Big Society" which neither he nor anyone else truly understands but he repeats it and repeats it like a chant sung by an impotent alchemist hoping to turn base metal into gold.

English Public Schools have always been very good at turning out dummies who come to occupy high positions.  They have negative virtues like "A safe pair of hands" and look the part of a gentleman interrupted from doing something more important than running the country.  This was deceptive when applied to McMillan who was much cleverer than he seemed but not to poor Dave who will make us all poorer without meaning to. These cheering words shoulbe enough on a foul February morning.

Update

Blogging has been recently suspended due to  battery failure on the laptop.  A new one is winging its way towards me.

I am very lucky at my age in life to be so well looked after by Hilary who is quite simply a "Ministering Angel" and will henceforth be known as the M.A.  This in spite of her own problems which cause permanent pain and may be compared to what Henry James called "my obscure pain"  (This got him out of the American Civil War in spite of two younger brothers going out to fight.  This is going to be literary name dropping week.)

Orwell's book about the Spanish Civil War is now finished leaving me with the problem of why is it that people will leave their own firesides, put on uniforms and find themselves lying in a ditch with rats running over them trying to kill a complete stranger against whom they have no personal animosity? It was this that so intrigued Tolstoy as Isaiah  Berlin pointed out in "The Hedgehog and the Fox" and led him to write "War and Peace".   No answers to this but to recall that many people behaved bravely and thought they were doing their bit in the fight against Fascism - a very real threat at the time.  Moving on to Tony Judt's book of European History since 1945.  800 plus pages will keep me quiet for a time.  (Incidentally, Churchill once invited Berlin to lunch during the War and ended up with the wrong man and found himself drinking brandy with the composer of Alexander's Ragtime Band, Irving Berlin. I wish I had been a fly on the wall.)

Aaaaaaaaagh!  Here is a horrible name to drop - Chris Patten, who is to become Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the BBC.  Rod Liddle did quite a good hatchet job in the Sunday Times but failed to remark that Patten nearly scuppered the General Agreement on Hong Kong when he was governer.  A special envoy from the Foreign Office had to fly out to Peking and reassure them that Patten was a paper tiger.  Actually more like a paper pussy cat.  The worst sort of Tory always trying to placate the left while publicising his own trendy views.  He flew out to Hong Kong with two dogs - one called whisky, the other soda - and two leggy teenage daughters in mini-skirts.  Once there he did a new broom act which only infuriated the Chinese on the mainland and soon disillusioned those in Hong Kong. He is supposed to be able to stand up to those already at the BBC.  But I could do that and would have no trouble in sacking the Depouty Controller of Light Entertainment (Fishguard division) and any other administrator who just got in the way of better programmes.  Perhaps I should start with the man who gave 15 million pounds to a foul mouthed slob whose name will not sully this blog. 

Medical bulletin:
                          Head:  Just about OK
                          Body: Mostly functioning
                          Legs:  In need of complete replacement

I have discovered what is wrong with Dave but this will have to wait until the next exciting  instalment.

Foreign Affairs

It's farewell to the drawing room's civilised cry

The professor's sensible wherefore and why;

The frock coated diplomat's social aplomb

Now matters are settled with riot and mob.

The Middle East is in turmoil.  What must we do?  Nothing nothing nothing.  Let's hope this is the end of our meddling in other countries' affairs.  The trouble is that once the schoolboys get into those grand Victorian buildings in Whitehall they think we ruled the world again. We should send nothing abroad but good advice instead of money and troops.  We have experience and are prepared to share our views with the rest of the world.  How grateful they should be.

Duncan Smith has unveiled his "radical" plan to reform benefits and cut out the poverty trap.  Will they work?  The sole object of taxation should be to raise money and do nothing else.  It should be divorced from morality and we should stop hunting the chimera of "Social Justice".  The new method of payment will probably not cover the cost - ever increasing - of travelling to and from work.  And I still don't know what legitimate income you need to compare with benefits plus £300.00 a week (net cash) earned in the black economy by doing a little light gardening (for three days work) in a leafy suburb.  I asked Smith but he did not answer my letter.

The solution of course is to abandon diferential rates of income tax and have one flat rate of say 20%.
It does not do any harm in Hong Kong and has actually been reduced recently.  My son Simon lives there and can't afford to come home to our ruined country.

Edukashon, Educayshon, Education.

| A brilliant example of joined-up government follows:

Too few poor students get to University
Free the Universities to set their own fees
Universities put up their fees
Too few poor students get to University.

Well done!  Drinks all round on expenses.

The Colonel was spluttering down the phone, "Bring back National Service."
"No, no, Colonel.  Turn education into National Service."

Scene: The playground of a large Comprehensive school.  Children are milling about. A Sergeant Major appears. He speaks loudly.

"Nah then you horrible lot.  My name's "Bull".  You play ball with me and I'll play ball with you  You will obey me instantly.  Girls are all dismissed to the other comprehensive nearby.  Don't want any distractions do we?
Get fell in, in columns of three.  You with the dyed hair can be right marker.  Discipline is strict but fair.  If you break the rules you go over the wall into the glass house.  I'm telling you you wont like it.
You will be shoved into classes according to age.  The masters are all bastards if you don't behave and can use the cane if they need to.
All empty your pockets and put the contents on the ground.  Knives will be conviscated as will drugs  and i-pods, i-pads and anything else beginning with i.  I shall give the order to dismiss when you will turn smartly to the right count to ten and run to the main hall where your class will be allocated. You're not here to like me your hear to learn.  Smartly now, DISMISS!"

       Actually I admired the Sergeant Majors I met in the army and easily forgave them their abuse of the English language and the Latin one too.  "You see that motto up there ,'Mens sana in
corpore sano'  It means that if you've got a clean body you'll have a clean mind."

Gaga about Gaga

At last a pop star with a sense of humour managed by a brilliant publicity seeker.  Lady Gaga can be seen on the internet, dressed in meat or coming out of an egg.  How Dali would have liked it.
It is now nearly a hundred years since Tristan Tzara founded the DaDa movement and the studio tricks began to mystify and outrage the bourgeoisie.  And it still survives tho Tzara himself declared that since DaDa was against everything it was against itself and hence must be abolished.  But it survives many years after wotsisname painted a baguette blue and helps to make life amusing.

The BAFTA awards where the ladies looked so lovely and the men looked so bizarre.  The strapless evening dress seems to have come back tho the cut of it is supposed to push the bosom up not down.  The same goes for the one that is slashed to the navel.  Perhaps couturiers dont like bosoms. 

An offspring solicitor is appearing at the Old Bailey defending a young man who murdered his grandmother.  He is trying to get his guilty client found guilty of only manslaughter.  Expert witnesses do not agree about how mad he is and was.  A judge and jury will sit for at least two weeks and the defendant has a QC and junior appearing as well.  Advocacy that we could never afford. What a civilised process it is.  The legal aid bill is so small compared to our massive debts that we should really leave it alone.

Poor old Dave is still banging on about the Big Society.  Thinking about Good "Bills"  I thought of Big Ben and Big Bill Broonzies.  Against this we have the Big Bad Wolf.  Carry on with the game.

Dissociation of Government

Wake early to a lovely spring morning.
       If winter comes can spring be far behind?
       Spring the sweet spring: Hey ding a ding ding
                                              Sweet lovers love the spring
No ding a ding for me:
       Once that we have lost this fight,
       Tis for us perpetual night.

Oh well,. nothing can be done.

I said from the start that this blog was not going to be a column but there are exceptions to every rule especially those one has made for oneself.   So, thinking about the way that government has become detached from society as a whole will be receiving some attention from now on.

I see I was quite wrong about Egypt.  Never explain.  Never apologise.  I must get to work on my book on the matter which has two alternative titles: "A Smile for the Sphinx" or "The Upturned Pyramid".

Which do you prefer?  Answers typewritten on A4 paper to me.





           

The Big Society continued

Does not Scarlett Johanssen look lovely in "The Times" today. The half open mouth and the tousled hair. "Post coitum omne animal triste" But she looks happy. Perhaps she is thinking about her fee.

Let's get this thing about the Big Society out of the way and I promise not to mention it again. Poor little Francis Maude is being sent in to bat for it on TV. So I volunteered to work at the library but it was closed due to the irrelevant and useless "cuts". I don't understand why everyone is being so kind to the Boy David. All together now shout from the rooftops "The Big Society" is total crap. His Goliath was nothing but a mirage and when examined there was nothing there but a ghost.

Mubarag is playing his hand pretty well.  Stalemate until someone comes along with a whiff of grapeshot.  But you need a Napoleon for that.  Is there one waiting in the wings?

Big is Bad

Whoever thought of the Big Society got the name wrong. It was probsbly one of those advisors, photographers etc who have to be sacked soon after they are appointed. (Dave can't choose or assess people. They don't teach that at Oxford.)It is the word "Big" that is all wrong:

Big Brother, Big business, big bad wolf. Nobody likes "big". Dave had a bad time yesterday as the Milliband boy improves in an oily sort of way and I hope to see the coalition crack up. Then we can have another election and let Labour back in again to clear up the ghastly mess that they have made of the country. Meanwhile the Conservatives can choose a conservative candidate who does not spend all his time struggling to please the Lib Dems and has forgotten to do anything for his supporters. PMQ exposes them all. What a shower they look! What a shower they are. (Shower is here an abbreviation of army slang "Shower of Shit") They might at least dress neatly even if they do have to sleep on camp beds.

The Egypt turmoil has reminded me again of my days in the Middle East. After Suez I was sent to Jerusalem where I drove a lorry. There we fired off all the ammunition that we had into the Mediterranean. I hated the guns which were twenty fiv pounders and made a terrible cracking noise. Only cissies wore ear plugs. Thence to a bit of desert outside Tripoli where I became barman at the officers mess. Wot a cushy skyve! By Jove it would do our young unemployables abit of good. Am I getting old?

Pundits with their Pants Down

Middle East watchers have been so obsessed with the Arab-Israeli stalemate  that they have largely forgotten Egypt and so have to pretend to know all about what was coming.  That is quite unlike our driver in Cairo two years ago.  He was certain of pending civil strife and told us so.  What will happen to all those crowds of people who depended on tourism for a living?  Life is surely not going to get better for them as they stray among the deserted streets and empty hotels.  This may be an ideal time to go to Luxor with its fine old fashioned hotel, delightful small museum where the relics of the great era of Egypt can be seen on a human scale.  The weather is hot, the wind is dry and the views of the Nile are seductive.  Steer clear of the food, especially Omelettes "Agatha Christie".  There is an Italian restaurant  which may be worth trying.

Dave seems to be at it again.  Since the "Big Society" has been rumbled we now move on to be "Muscular Liberals".  More people have been sacked because they should never have been appointed and the MPs can't even run their own expenses system.  The weedy man who runs it  will probably be kicked upstairs to the Lords who are rapidly becoming "multi-cultural".

Certainly the Big Society was a misnomer as anything "big" is despised. e.g.
Big Business, Big Brother etc.  There must be one big thing that is not bad. Try this:

The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing. 

Memories of Egypt 1948

Small boys were swimming near the troop ship, offering us - the newly arriving conscripts - all sorts of delights.
>You want my sister, Johnny?  She very nice, she very clean.
>You want Spanish Fly, Johnny?  Make you big and strong.
>You want whisky, Johnny?

There were no takers among the lowest ranks, living on four shillings a day.  Corporals could afford the whores and sergeants could buy whisky (> Cheap at half the price ) But for the poor bloody squaddy living on four shillings a day there was little to buy in Port Said.

Later I was in a camp in Port Suez where I developed a swollen knee.  I reported sick and stood around on melting tarmac until a corporal came up to our group.
>What I like to see is a really smart sick parade, he said.> Left right Left right left right.
I was left behind as I could not walk.  I lay on  a bed which was really a table and every now and then a medical orderly would pass by and ask me if I had ever had syphilis. I was sent to a ward which was simply a long tent in the desert with about twenty men in beds lined up on either side. I wrote home cheerfully to say that I had reheumatic fever. I was in the ward, dosed with quinine and beer for a month.  My companions were unexciting but pretending to have TB as one of them was actually ill with it. He would go round spitting in other sputum mugs so that the malingerers could stay in bed all day. One day we were inspected by a general who managed to inspect (>Now then, lie to attention) a patient who had just died.
Four weeks later I was transferred to a convalescent depot where I read Frank Harris's erotic autobiography. (The statitics are very impressive but you should have seen some of the women.)  Guard duty on the Suez canal as boats with headlights drifted through the linked up lakes. Afterwards rejoined my regiment and drove a lorry through the streets of Jerusalem.
After that I was back in Port Said to catch a boat home to be demobbed.

I had little contact with the Egyptians apart from the sellers of rubbish but in hospital there were charming men who came and shaved me while I was still in bed.  We did however sing their national anthem: King Farouk, King Farouk,
              Hang your bollocks on a hook,,,,  and so on,

All this makes me uniquely qualified as a pundit on the current turmoil in this unhappy country.
Natural passimism leads me to expect that they will end up with an Ayotollah,  Plus ca change.
















        

Random Thoughts 3

On further thought I have decided to omit the rows of ns from future blogs. I thought I had deleted them but sadly I had not.  Are we looking at a new LapTop?

Isn't global warming wonderful? As day by day goes by it gets warmer and warmer and the winter has been sooooo mild. And so it goes - "warm days will never cease" "while the hounds of spring are on winter's traces"  And that is something else no one in the Government knows anything about so they accept the view that gives the greatest opportunity to increase taxes.  Almost the last disservice of grumpy Gordon Brown was to promise billions of our money to developing countries to cheer them up when they discovered that the money was really to stop them from developing.  So Dave and his schoolboys took the word of 50,000 palaeobotanists and will soon be passing a law preventing any gainsaying.

Incidentally Dr Marie Stopes was herself not a doctor of medicine but a doctor of science specialising in paleaobiology.  Tho the author of helpful books about how to avoid pregnancy she was forty before she lost her virginity and had her first orgasm which she did not like and complained about it to the mortification of her current husband.  She addressed him in letters as "Tiger Humphlekins"  He claimed to be the first man to use a typewriter while flying in a plane. But the tiger had lost his claws and she divorced him to have a series of lovers all of whom were much younger and equipped with wonderful muscular bodies.

The glass is falling hour by hour

The glass will fall forever.

But if you break the bloody glass

It won't hold up the weather.    

Madness at Large

WOW!!!!!!!!!! Has everybody gone mad?  Paxman is back after a break when he had his brain softened.
So last night he showed us a lot of louts marching into a Vodaphone shop and demanding that Vodaphone pay some ludicrous amount in taxation.   To comment on this the producer had acquired the help of a ratfaced Trade Unionist and someone from perhaps the Institute of Economic Affairs or some such body - rosy cheeked optimistic.  They then proceeded to talk about the morals of taxation during which Ratface frevealed himself to be a very old fashioned communist.

I saw something different.  I saw a band of citizens marching into a shop owned by another band of citizens and demanding that a huge sum of money should be handed over to the Government.  But the collection of taxes is the most unpopular thing that a government has to do.  Wars have been fought over it.  Men have died for it.  New nations have emerged from it.  Yet here we see ordinary citizens doing the work of government and the dirtiest work at that. The Government should not be let off the hook, but they love to see tax collected by some third party.

Once they have done this by having differential rates of tax and intoducing PAYE they can divide the people into two groups and make each think  that the other is their enemy.  Thus did they convince the marchers of Oxford Street that Vodaphone was cheating them on the flimsiest possible grounds. And thus do Dave and his schoolboys rule the country.                 nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn