Foreign Adventures

I knew it! We've backed the wrong side.  The best we can hope for now is that a genuine civil war will break out ending with Libya breaking up into what it always was - Tripolitania and Cyrenaica.  We should never have got involved as I said at the time - not least because we cannot afford to pretend anymore that we are a major world power.  Thanks to Blair, Brown and Balls we are virtually bankrupt, yet at the moment we sem to prefer spending on bombs rather than books.  "Whom the Gods wish to destroy they first drive mad."  The Palace of Westminster is becoming a loony bin.

 A lovely letter arrives addressed to 'Dear Robin' from a number of people I have never met.  They all seem to be show biz celebs among them Joanna Lumley and that man who was Darcy in a wet shirt.  They all want me to vote in favour of the Alternative Vote.  I shall take no notice of them.  Actors have been always been distrous politically - look at Vanessa Redgrave.  If we have AV, Clegg and Vince  will have the balance of power forever.  What a thought!

Please click on the Blue "Night Thoughts" link below to see the complete blog 

Bombs are Good for You

In the wee small hours of the morning it occurred to me that the last time the French and the British ganged up on a country in North Africa - also ruled by a Colonel - it all ended in tears. I hope it won't happen again but I am frightened of all those untrained undisciplined rebels firing off their kalashnikovs.  They are sure to kill some civilians and we only went to Tripoli to protect the ordinary people many of whom must be neutral.  Never mind.  I am sure that Dave and the Dwarf know what they are doing.

I keep looking on the map for the village sixty miles south of Tripoli where I spent some time  mixing drinks for the officers of the 52nd Observation Regiment R A.  But that was many years ago when it only had one shop and one brothel.  It must have grown since then. The name was Garyhan.  Let me know if you see it.

Budget Blues

Summer time and the living is easy.......No its not. We have to put up with Boy George's budget full of tax increases - direct and indirect - and talk of  "cuts".  We shall not succeed in achieving the "cuts"  because as soon as enough people protest Dave and the schoolboys will back down.  Even if by some miracle we do what we say we are going to do we shall only be back we were in 2008 when government borrowing was already out of control.  Meanwhile we go on adding to our deficit by £1 billion a week.  Never mind. Dave is taking charge of the military operations above the skies in Libya so all will be well there and we can go ahead with scrapping warships.

Rear of the Year
Last year's winner was Fiona Bruce whom you may have seen introducing the "Antiques Roadshow".  This was in spite of my championing Harriet Harman who was also in the running.  No short list is yet available for this year but I am thinking of proposing Kate Middleton.  Her bum is well spoken of, but perhaps we should wait until the wedding is over before making a final decision.

Janet Daley in the Sunday Telegraph on taxation is worth reading.  Boy George will ignore her because he thinks he is soooooo clever.

Spring thoughts

Spring is a time to cleanse one's mind and rid it of thoughts of the world, peopled by those who rule our nations and ourselves and spend their time thinking of new ways to tax us so that they can play with their missiles and bombs and strut around the world making it worse than it was before.  What are we doing in Libya?  How do we get out?

For the time being I shall ignore them while flowers are blooming and there is warmth in the sun.  Tomorrow I shall have to think again of the morons, idiots and nincompoops who hold sway over the impotent masses of the world.  In this weather it can easily be put aside even in a patio garden in London.    

     Meanwhile the mind from pleasures less

    Withdraws into its happiness;

The mind, that ocean where each kind

Does straight its own resemblance find,

Annihilating all that's made

To a green thought in a green shade.

Unpleasant comments must wait until tomorrow.

Undeserved Praise

I suppose you have to admit that Boy George did quite a good job of reading out the speech that someone else had prepared for him.  The worst thing that anybody has said so far is that it is a neutral budget  and that his forecasts for growth will be wrong again.  How kind everyone is to someone who is going to collect £589 billion from the long suffering taxpayers of our country and then spend £710 billion.  That will mean that our debts will increase by £10 billion a month. The only good thing about it is that he proposes to scrap the 50% higher income tax rate in accordance with my representation to Dave when the ridiculous idea was first put forward brought in. But everybody knew that it was a non-starter when Brown (remember him?) brought it in.

Such were the dark thoughts of my mind in the early hours of this morning. I don't want to go on being depressing but Elizabeth Taylor was not "The First and Last Great Hollywood Star" as the Times would have it .  I am sory that she is dead but she was not Garbo, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis or some others I could think of.  She was more admired by women than by men and never exuded the sex appeal of Marilyn Monroe. Disagreement with this view would be welcome.

I will be more jolly next time with a special note on how well we are doing in Libya.  Our troops will be landing there soon for another great triumph of meddling about in the Middle East.  

On Cameron On

It is impossible not to be reminded of the Iron Duke's comment, "I don't know if they'll frighten the enemy, but by God, they frighten me."  I refer of course to the triumvirate who are running our latest entanglement in the Middle East - Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy.  The first two are disappointing and I never had any hope for the third. 

After the first excitement of dropping bombs and firing missiles which will please the Generals and other armchair warriors (they love playing with their toys)  we can only hope that Gaddafi comes out with his hands up.  The Times today is quite disgusting in its enthusiasm for more lovely pictures of explosions, death and destruction.  It may be that they have got it all wrong and Gaddafi will tough it out.  In that case we will have made another enemy and see many people die for no advantage to our poor country.   And can we afford to do what we are doing?  How can we afford to open another front when we can't afford libraries?

The BBC made quite a good stab at showing the world of Isherwood and Auden in the 1930's in Christopher and his Kind.  Period details are so good.  Auden got it right seventy five years ago:

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

The professor's sensible whereto and why;

The frock-coated diplomat's social aplomb

Now matters are settled with missile and bomb.

We don't seem to have come very far.

HMS Tripolitania

The last time that I visited Tripoli I arrived by boat on the troopship Tripolitania.  It had been a German cargo boat when it was sunk in Port Said only to be refloated and done up sparsely to accomodate several hundred sea sick soldiers in hammocks.  It was not noted for its speed and took ten days to go from Port Said to Tripoli.  I was glad to get off it.

That is the obvious way to get into the town. So to put an end to Gaddafi's rein we should send a warship or two stuffed with marines who could land easily, storm the town and capture it and the colonel as well.  With our typical genius for getting things wrong we are going to follow everything but this simple plan.  We shall soon be dropping bombs on civilians who want to play no part in the rebellion while encouraging the insurgents in Benghazi to think that we are actually helping them.  Another disastrous adventure in the Middle East.  What with this and the catastrophe in Japan I had quite forgotten about the earthquake in New Zealand. Gloom everywhere.  "Give me some civet good apothecary to sweeten my imagination."

So let's think about the Royal Wedding.  This will be a heartwarming diversion from the ills of the world and give middle earners something to enjoy while the government is taking more and more money away from them.  Two good looking but very ordinary people are marrying while the world looks on.  Something for everyone to enjoy if they are not being bombed or threatened by earthquakes.    

Poet Laureate

Three o'clock in the morning is a good time for remembering that our current poet laureate has declared a lack of interest in the coming Royal Wedding. I have since discovered that she is called Carol Duffy and has impeccable working class origins being born in the Gorbals of Glasgow. Never having read her I turn to Google who has reams of her outpourings and give them a cursory glance.  Laureates are not usually much good but this is the first time that I have found a poet who has been influenced by both Auden and William McGonnagle:  A sample couplet strikes the eye:
                                                     It somehow does not just seem right

That over our beliefs we fight. 

A banal thought in clumsy words.  It is obvious that she publishes too much as there must be something better than this.  Of course Spenser set the standard for verse celebrating a wedding:

Against the bridal day which is not long,

Sweet Thames run softly till I end my song.

"To be a poet is indeed very difficult ," as Dr Johnson remarked. 

It has struck me that the ideal place for a millionaire to live in is London.  There he can live in a fine apartment or possible a hotel (the Ritz) stroll down Piccadilly to have a shave at Trumper's, browse for books at Heywood Hill and follow this by lunch at on of the best restaurants that he will find anywhere.  The evening provides more world class entertainment as London has the best theatres to be found. After that another restaurant then a night club with a lady of surpassing beauty from an escort agency.  This will leave him plenty of time in the afternoon to make even more money so that he can carry on his enviable lifestyle.  When he is tired of all this he can go into the country for hunting shooting and fishing. (Only in Scotland will he be able to shoot the grouse who come silently and very fast over the butts) .  But why should we want millionaires?  Watch this space.  

Poor Dave

Dave does not listen to me, which is all part of his defective mental equipment.  I said that PPE was a useless subject before when the obvious subject for a potential Prime Minister is "History".  If he had read that he would have surely known that it is not wise to tangle with a despot who is coping with an insurrection.  To do this you need immense fire power and determination otherwise you are bound to get hurt and harm the unfortunate rebels who think that you are going to help them out of their troubles.  When Hitler was faced with an insurrection in Warsaw in 1944 he killed 200,000 Poles.  If Gaddafi does not finish off  the rebels quickly he is quite capable of doing something like it to his own people and then turn on the people who kept on urging him to step down without the power to make him do so.  What a sorry mess.  Dave should stop poncing around on the world stage and stay at home to sort out the terrible problems that the Blair-Brown government left behind them.

Yesterday was the anniversary of Karl Marx's death.  How kind of us to give him sanctuary in the British Museum where he could write the work that has done so much harm in the world. I have not read his work and am too old to do so now.  Courage.  There is a good overview of socialist thought in the 19th century in "To the Finland Station" by Edmund Wilson.  When Marx was living in London he took pains to avoid another exiled revolutionary, Alexander Herzen, the author of a wonderful autobiography "My Past and Thoughts" available in paperback.  Herzen was working for a peaceful revolution which was not what Marx wanted at all.  What a shame that Marx won the race for the hearts and minds of so many.  

Rich Food

To Pierre Koffman's at the Berkeley Hotel with two much travelled friends just back from the Middle East keeping one jump ahead of rioting mobs and noticing only the beauty of the artefacts and the surprisingly good food. But Koffman's is seriously excellent tho rich rich. (I don't know much about Gascony whence he comes but I once went there to a town called Condom - a dreary French provincial town. I hurried on to the fleshpots of the Dordogne).

Rich - such is the nature of drowsiness - reminds me of the famous exchange between Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.  Scott: The rich are different from us.  Ernest: Yes they have more money.  It is generally thgought of as a putdown - Hemingway putting Fitzgerald down for the count.  But I think they've got it all wrong.  Scott was not talking about plain rich people - he meant rich rich people, so cocooned in their wealth that ordinary experiences passed them by.  They were the ones that fascinated him and Gatsby had to get as rich as them to be worthy of Daisy.  I am glad to say that John Updike is on my side.  Comments welcome.
 
Oh dear back to politics.  Someone ought to tell Dave that when a major supplier of oil finds that he has a rebellion on his hands he (Dave) should wait and see who wins and then cuddle up to the victorious side instead of sending good will messages to the insurgents.  We usually let the people we are backing down because we have not got enough guns and tanks and warships and now we are going to have still fewer of them thanks to the "Cuts" which will start any day now.  As for Hague and his disaster with a helicopter raid or mission or diplomatic initiative, I don't know whether to weep or cry. The emissaries left behind their weapons as well as the helicopter so they will all be court martialed of course or they might get the MBE.  Watch this space.

Jeepers Creepers and all that Jazz

This blog is getting too like a piece of journalism.  Blogs should be served raw and not cooked.  OK. Let's go.

What has happened to America?  It used to produce men of stature to run their country.  I'm thinking of FDR, Truman even Nixon had some apparent ability. Now all they put up is men like Clinton and Bush who are there to represent all that is worst in the huge country whose middle west seems to be full of c inward looking and religious morons.

What has happened to the USA which has given me such pleasure from Henry James and Edith Wharton to John Updike and Philip Roth to mention only a fragment of its literature? Not forgetting all those wonderful Hollywood films, the hot dog, the hamburger, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. And this leads me on to jazz - the great contribution to happy music making from the American Blacks.

I was lucky enough to catch those little jazz bars on 52nd Street.  Very late one night I was at Jimmy Ryan's listening to Vic Dickenson playing the trumpet when Ruby Braff was playing his cornet next door at Eddy Condon's.  I got them both together and they obliged me by playing Jeepers Creepers for me.  One was black and the other white - who  gives a damn? (They are playing it to me now thanks to modern technology.)

Of course the blacks played with other blacks and the whites had to have their own bands.  So the whites tidied up the black man's music and it was played at proms and other dances by people like Glenn Miller, Sammy Kaye and Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians. Yuk! It was left to Artie Shaw (white clarinet player once married to Lana Turner the sweater girl) to break the taboo and the black trumpeter, Hot Lips Page sat in with him as did Roy Little Jazz Eldridge. Tommy Dorsey pinched Sy Oliver (trumpet and composer) from the big black swinging band of Jimmie Lunceford.  There Oliver did some of his best work  - opus number one, Yes Indeed etc...He could not sit with the other trumpets but could sing with Jo Stafford.  Wow.  A black man singing with a white girl. (Can you believe it?  But I speak as one who has ridden in a bus in the Deep South when the blacks were sent to the back of the bus.) Thank goodness the prescription did not last and by the time New York became the centre of the jazz world nobody cared who was black and who was white. Then Charlie Parker came along and spoiled most of the fun and jazz fell into the hands of academics and smart arse Frenchmen who sat around in the Blue Note in Paris wearing berets and taking notes.  Jazz shoulld be listened to while strolling around with a drink.  Aspirations towards respectability are fatal.  It was a sad day when Duke Ellington gave a "concert" at Carnegie Hall.  (How do I get to Carnegie Hall said the pedestrian? Practice practice practice.) I shall return to the subject later but now I am listening to Sidney Bechet playing the clarinet with such vibrato.  I sat next to Kingsley Amis at a very prolonged lunch and said I had not got a good CD of Bechet.  "Try Blackstick"  "Is that good?" I asked naively.  He threw back his head and shouted, "No.  It's fucking marvellous!" 

Cameron at Bay

Those dark forces which hover over every computer-led enterprise attacked last week and were partially successful until driven away by my computer magician, Denise.  This accounts for the rather eccentric delivery of blogs recently.  The error has now been erased from memory and should not happen again.

What  is Cameron doing?  He is messing about in the Middle East when he ought to be at home overseeing the cuts he has proposed.  He reminds me more and more of Anthony Eden.  Here is another four letter word he may not know: "Suez". (Don't they teach modern history at Eton?). He funks carrying out the "cuts"  while strangling growth with the top rate of income tax at 50%.  We shall end up by getting the worst of both worlds i.e. inadequate cuts of irrevelant items and low growth dependant on the rest of the world growing.  A neighbour is going back to her home town - New York.  Taxation was the last straw for her so Boy George will get 50% of nothing instead of 40% of quite a lot.  Well that will please Vince "Soak the Rich" Cable who has learned nothing from the last fifty years of differential rates of  income tax. It will please Duncan Smith as well, as a step towards "Social Justice".

The Sunday papers are far too big and the articles far too long.  No wonder they can't collect enough money from advertising. 

It is now nearly a hundred years since Marcel Duchamp dipped a baguette in blue paint and called it a work of art approved by Tristan Tzara and the rest of the DaDa movement.  Now we have a shark floating in formaldehyde.  So much for progress in the arts. 

Come back Terence Rattigan

Long,long ago I was walking down Kings Parade when I met an amusing friend.  It was so long ago that he was called a "queer" but that helped to make him even more amusing.  He grabbed my arm.  "My dear, I've had a wonderful week end with Terence Rattigan, the smart suburban playwright."

Recent revivals of plays by Rattigan, Coward and Somerset Maugham have sought to suggest that there was something more to them than they appeared at the time to be.  One thing that they all had in common was their homosexuality, carefully concealed at the time from the Great British Public.  None of them dared come out without risking a prison sentence and the middle class to whom they appealed certainly did not know this.  All the same I feel that they were all nothing more than good entertainment although possibly Coward had hidden depths, only now revealed.

They helped the British drama to stand still until the post war years and Harold Pinter broke the mould with "The Birthday Party".  I was lucky enough to see it before it was savaged by the critics in London and rapidly closed.  Rattigan and the others wrote as if time had stood still since about 1914 and the modern movement in literature had never taken place.  Pinter was the first to acknowledge and reflect the fact that Eliot and Auden had existed.  I don't think Pinter ever recovered from the mauling and adopted enigmatic solemnity when comedy was his real metier.  What a shame.

Migrant Labour

It is good to know that migrants are to receive the same benefits as the inhabitants who got here first.  They will stop seeking work and make it easier for our own people to get jobs.  They will walk straight into the poverty trap which is still a refuge for those who want to supplement their income with working in the black economy.  I have had a letter from Ian Duncan Smith congratulating himself on having reformed benefit payments.  He is a fraud and has only tinkered with the existing system.   The real problem lies with Income Tax and the pursuit of Social Justice. I must work up the energy to reply to him.  Meanwhile mentally challenged Dave makes bellicose noises about sending troops to Libya while disbanding our own forces to the extent of leaving our own country defenceless.  It is no use appealing to little Cleggy who goes skiing when he ought to be "running the country". Should we laugh or should we cry?

Make our troops redundant by all means but set them to work by training them as teachers or joining the anti-terorist police forces where they have skills that we need. This will not happen as it is a sensible thing to do.

Theatrical musing

Long,long ago I was walking down Kings Parade when I met an amusing friend.  It was so long ago that he was called a "queer" but that helped to make him even more amusing.  He grabbed my arm.  "My dear, I've had a wonderful week end with Terence Rattigan, the smart suburban playwright."

Recent revivals of plays by Rattigan, Coward and Somerset Maugham have sought to suggest that there was something more to them than they appeared at the time to be.  One thing that they all had in common was their homosexuality, carefully concealed at the time from the Great British Public.  None of them dared come out without risking a prison sentence and the middle class to whom they appealed certainly did not know this.  All the same I feel that they were all nothing more than good entertainment although possibly Coward had hidden depths, only now revealed.

They helped the British drama to stand still until the post war years and Harold Pinter broke the mould with "The Birthday Party".  I was lucky enough to see it before it was savaged by the critics in London and rapidly closed.  Rattigan and the others wrote as if time had stood still since about 1914 and the modern movement in literature had never taken place.  Pinter was the first to acknowledge and reflect the fact that Eliot and Auden had existed.  I don't think Pinter ever recovered from the mauling and adopted enigmatic solemnity when comedy was his real metier.  What a shame.

Migrant Labour

It is good to know that migrants are to receive the same benefits as the inhabitants who got here first.  They will stop seeking work and make it easier for our own people to get jobs.  They will walk straight into the poverty trap which is still a refuge for those who want to supplement their income with working in the black economy.  I have had a letter from Ian Duncan Smith congratulating himself on having reformed benefit payments.  He is a fraud and has only tinkered with the existing system.   The real problem lies with Income Tax and the pursuit of Social Justice. I must work up the energy to reply to him.  Meanwhile mentally challenged Dave makes bellicose noises about sending troops to Libya while disbanding our own forces to the extent of leaving our own country defenceless.  It is no use appealing to little Cleggy who goes skiing when he ought to be "running the country". Should we laugh or should we cry?

Make our troops redundant by all means but set them to work by training them as teachers or joining the anti-terorist police forces where they have skills that we need. This will not happen as it is a sensible thing to do.

Oscars and others

 OSCARS

Wasn't it exciting even if we all knew who was going to win?  The usual display of some of the most beautiful people in the world led to the usual boring speeches of thanks.  Did anyone actually say "and thank you to my little dog"?  I am waiting for a recipient to say, "Thank you for this small hideous statuette but I want to complain about the food...."  I was told years ago that Oscar was the name of the head waiter at the Algonquil Hotel where Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and friends had their lunches.  (When Anita Loos who wrote the Great American Novel ate there she was unimpressed by the talk.)

That leads naturally to the death of Jane Russell who starred in "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes".  I well remember all the fuss that was engineered by the producer about the amount of cleavage they could show in their posters.  What an excitement.  The Puritanical but lustful public flocked to see her in a specially designed bra to support and reveal her splendid bosom.  What innocence.

But the Oscars again.  What a shame that one of our greatest actors was not even nominated although his photograph adorned the front page of "The Times" yesterday.  There he was a little older and obviously wiser displaying a furrowed brow and hair greying at the temples projecting his deep concern for the troubles of the world while recalling at the same time the youthful exuberance of his brilliant youth at the start of thirteen years of New Labour Government which pauperised the country.  I refer of course to Tony Blair the millionaire international statesman.  From Tony the Boy Wonder to distinguished international statesman his career has just been one marvellous performance and I only envy him that small Queen Ann house that was once John Gielgud's.  We must start campaigning for him at once.

And now the mad politicians are at it again hoping to settle internal warfare overseas with guns and bombs. But we cannot bomb them in case we kill too many innocent civilians.  And we can't shoot them because we cannot tell friend from foe. (In any case all our troops abroad have got the wrong sort of gun.  Nothing can beat the Kalashnikov as Max Hastings pointed out in a recent article in the NY Review of Books.  The Middle East is bristling with them.)  And the country is broke.  We cannot afford in men money or materials any more.  We probably can't even defend ourselves.  All the same John Major was on the radio this a.m. talking about "military action" against Gadaffi. The Palace of  Westminster is a mad house.  Come back Guy Fawkes - all is forgiven.