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.